Give and take between proactive and reactive cognitive control during attentional suppression

During the visual search, distractor processing can be actively suppressed when distractor features are explicitly cued in advance. This has been revealed by faster reaction times when participants are informed of the distractor (negative condition) than when being provided with no information about distractor (neutral condition) (Arita et al. 2012; Carlisle et Nitka, 2018). Increasing evidence suggests that attentional effect relies on cognitive control mechanisms. The proactive control engagement attenuates the processing before the distractor stimulus appears (e.g., before the search display) (Huang et al 2021), whereas the reactive control engagement operates immediately after the distractor stimulus presentation to terminate distractor processing (e.g., after the search display) (Adam & Serences, 2021). Although the exploration of these mechanisms has been of particular interest in recent years, the relationship between proactive and reactive engagement during attentional suppression is not well characterized. For that reason, we analyzed the preexisting EEG data of fourteen participants (cf. Carlisle et Nitka, 2018). Frontal midline ERPs and time-frequency analyses were performed after the cue onset to explore proactive control mechanisms, and after the search display onset to explore reactive control mechanisms. The cue could indicate the upcoming target color during search display (positive), the upcoming distractor color (negative) or be non-informative (neutral condition). Our analysis revealed a significant lower reactive-related activity in negative compared to positive condition. The correlational analysis show that this reduced reactive activity was associated to the increase proactive control engagement after the cue presentation. Taken together, these results suggest that proactive and reactive suppression strategies might operate independently; proactive engagement induced by negative cues is associated to a reduced reactive mobilization. Future studies are needed to determine whether the use of one strategy over another is task-dependent or dependent on intra- or interindividual variations in cognitive control engagement.