Executive functions: Are Amodal Representations Involved in Proactive Control?

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A crucial aspect of everyday behavior is our ability to maintain goal-oriented behavior and to switch between controlled and automated processing rather effortlessly. Besides short-term, reactive adjustments to information processing, it is assumed that cognitive control implements also proactive mechanisms to configure the cognitive system in such a way that context-appropriate and efficient performance is achieved. We examine whether proactive control operates on amodal representations (i.e., stimulus-, response-, and task-unspecific). First, in sensorimotor conflict tasks, we investigate cross-modal and cross-task proactive control effects. If amodal representations underlie proactive adjustments, this should lead to domain-general transfer effects, and we plan to dissociate these proactive effects from those triggered by reactive control mechanisms (which appear to depend on more modal representations). A mathematical model will be used to further specify the mechanisms underlying these adjustments as well. Second, we aim to generalize our approach by investigating proactive control adjustments during language processing.