Ocular signatures of proactive versus reactive cognitive control in young adults

During the execution of a cognitive task, the brain maintains contextual information to guide behavior and achieve desired goals. The AX-Continuous Performance Task is used to study proactive versus reactive cognitive control. Young adults tend to behave proactively in standard testing conditions. However, it remains unclear how interindividual variability (e.g., in cognitive and motivational factors) may drive people into more reactive or proactive control under the same task demands. We investigated the use of control strategies in a large population of healthy young adults. We computed the proactive behavioral index and consequently divided participants into proactive, reactive, and intermediate groups. We found that reactive participants were generally slower, presented lower context sensitivity, and larger response variability. Pupillary changes and blink rate index cognitive effort allocation. We measured, concomitantly to the task, the pupil size and frequency of blinks associated with the cue maintenance and response intervals. During the cue period, nonfrequent, nontarget cues led to increased pupil dilation and number of blinks in all participants. During the response interval, we found more errors and increased pupil dilation to the probe when all participants had to overcome a response bias generated by the frequent cue. Only reactive participants showed larger response-related pupil when they had to overcome a response bias related to the frequent probe. Contrary to expectations, groups did not differ in ocular measures in the cue period. In conclusion, interindividual differences in cognitive control between healthy adults can be mapped onto different patterns of effort allocation indexed by the pupil.