Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do We Direct Attention and Control Thought?
Use proactive and reactive control to explain when goal information shapes processing. Compare their costs, benefits, and temporal predictions without ranking one as universally better.
A question to consider. Someone can remember an intention throughout a short delay or rely on a reminder at the end. How would extending the delay or making the reminder less reliable change the comparison?
Why this reading
Successful control can involve preparing before interference occurs or recovering a goal when it is needed. Braver makes the timing of control an explanatory variable, connecting performance with the maintenance and retrieval of goal information.
Before you read
Proactive control maintains goal-relevant information in anticipation of a demand. Reactive control recruits that information when an event makes it necessary. Working memory keeps information available for current use. The prefrontal cortex is a set of brain regions implicated in control, not a single executive that consciously issues instructions.
Read for
- Translate Figure 1 into predictions about when a task goal should influence behavior and neural activity.
- Compare the benefits and costs of sustained goal maintenance with reliance on a later retrieval cue.
- Separate experimental changes within a person from differences between people or groups, and examine the unresolved measurement questions in Box 2.
Consider afterwards
- A reminder helps people resume an interrupted intention. What timing manipulation could distinguish maintaining the intention throughout the delay from retrieving it when the reminder appears?
Editorial context
The framework proposes modes that may coexist and vary with circumstances; it does not divide people into fixed proactive and reactive types. The paper explicitly treats their independence and behavioral measurement as unresolved. Neither mode is always superior, and a task score or activation pattern alone is not a diagnosis or a pure measure of one mechanism.