Dissociating proactive and reactive control in older adults.

The Dual Mechanisms of Control framework predicts that age-related declines should be most prominent for tasks that require proactive control, while tasks requiring reactive control should show minimal age differences in performance. However, results from traditional paradigms are inconclusive as to whether these two processes are independent, making it difficult to understand how these processes change with age. The present study manipulated the proportion congruency in a list-wide (Experiments 1 and 2) or item-specific (Experiment 1) fashion to independently assess proactive and reactive control, respectively. In the list-wide task, older adults were unable to proactively bias attention away from word processing based on list-level expectancies. Proactive control deficits replicated across multiple task paradigms, with different Stroop stimuli (picture-word, integrated color-word, separated color-word), and different behavioral indices (Stroop interference, secondary prospective memory). In contrast, older adults were successfully able to reactively filter the word dimension based on item-specific expectancies. These findings provide unambiguous support that aging is associated with declines in proactive, but not reactive, control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).