Reinstatement of temporal context retrieves cognitive control demands

Theories about the regulation of controlled processing have emphasized distinct “reactive” and “proactive” mechanisms. Reactive mechanisms respond to the ongoing detection of cognitive conflict, pulling the focus of the cognitive system towards the task it is trying to complete. On the other hand, proactive mechanisms can anticipate upcoming cognitive conflict, increasing task focus before such conflict is encountered. However, extensive previous work has found only moderate evidence for proactive control allocation when cognitive conflict is expected to occur. Instead, we propose that signatures of proactive control allocation can emerge from the episodic memory system—a notion formally described by a recently proposed computational model of episodic control allocation. Here, across 3 novel experiments, we confirm a unique prediction from this model; namely that participants allocate increased cognitive control as soon as they encounter a cue that signals future conflict, rather than defer this allocation to the moment when this conflict is expected to occur. This “memory-based” control allocation regulates a trade-off between facilitation on congruent trials and interference on incongruent trials similar to the typical “sequential congruency effect”. By contrast, we observed that participants can use cues about upcoming conflict to increase their overall task performance when this conflict is encountered, without instilling a trade-off between facilitation and interference. This is suggestive of a distinct proactive control mechanism that operates in tandem with memory-based control allocation.