Dissociating Proactive and Reactive Cognitive Control Processes

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Historically, cognitive control was conceptualized as a unitary concept, defined predominantly as a top-down process' that controlled lower-level sensory, motor, and memory operations to engage in coordinated, purposeful behaviour. More recently, an influential revision posits that cognitive control is not a single construct, but rather may have different modes, proactive and reactive, which are dissociable. Proactive control is associated with the active maintenance of task-relevant information to perform the appropriate response. By actively maintaining this information, “top-down control” can be executed and other systems can be biased towards task-relevant information. Reactive control, in contrast, would be engaged after rather than before the event requiring the control. This system would be more influenced by “bottom-up processes.” Under such a control strategy, initial task-relevant information would be processed transiently. Greater sustained activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex is hypothesized to play a central role in the active maintenance and updating of relevant information. In comparison, for reactive control, the lateral prefrontal cortex is involved transiently, and other brain regions are more involved. The limited number of studies evaluating this new theory have found evidence that proactive and reactive control processes can be differentiated and help to explain the heterogeneity in behaviour and neural mechanisms from previous studies. However, a number of key questions still remain to better understand the variability in cognitive control and the two modes, including under what condition each type of control is more likely to present, and the brain networks involved. Goal-directed activities are fundamental to human behaviour. Some of the variability and unreliability in behavioural and neuroimaging findings may be due to the unified view of cognitive control, and better understanding the dual mechanisms of control may further this important area of cognitive science. Last, investigating proactive and reactive control also has implications for neurological and psychological disorders; if deficits are more likely to present in one mode versus another in certain impaired populations, increasing reliance on the more spared mode may improve goal-directed behaviour and wellness.