Cue reliability and proactive control

People flexibly engage either proactive or reactive control to achieve their goal in dynamic environments. However, it remains unclear how specific environmental factors determine when proactive control is most effectively used. Across two experiments this study investigated how environmental predictability influences proactive control. We employed a self-paced task-switching paradigm in which participants triggered the target when they felt ready to respond to it and manipulated how reliably contextual cue information predicted the task rule. Experiment 1 showed that adult participants showed longer preparation times, reflecting spontaneous proactive preparation, faster responses, and reduced switch costs in a fully predictable environment (100% reliable cues) than in a completely unpredictable environment (50% reliable cues), indicating that participants adaptively engaged proactive control based on cue reliability. Experiment 2 further examined the relations between cue reliability and proactive control by comparing a more reliable condition (85% reliable cues) to a less reliable condition (65% reliable cues). Findings revealed that participants not only spent more time preparing under 85% reliability but also showed larger performance differences between “matched” (cue accurately predicting the task) and “unmatched” trials. These results reinforce the view that adults can detect more subtle differences in cue reliability compared to Experiment1 and adjust their proactive control accordingly. Finally, an integration of the findings from Experiment 1 and 2 suggests that two thresholds of cue reliability govern both the decision to engage and the effectiveness of cognitive control when adults modulate their proactive control based on environmental predictability.