In search of precue benefits: Are people unmotivated to heighten control on demand?

Congruency precues rarely produce benefits on incongruent trials in four-choice conflict tasks, raising questions about people's ability to heighten cognitive control on demand. The motivational hypothesis posits that benefits may be elusive because people are insufficiently motivated to engage effortful control in response to precues signaling an incongruent trial. We conducted three preregistered experiments using performance incentives to systematically test the motivational hypothesis in a condition where incongruent trial precue benefits previously were not found, namely, when preparation time was short. We observed precue benefits for reward and, surprisingly, no-reward trials in Experiment 1 (within-block incentive manipulation) and Experiment 2 (between-block incentive manipulation), suggesting a possible carryover effect of motivation. When incentives were manipulated between subjects (Experiment 3), a precue benefit was selective to the reward group. Although this pattern lends support to the motivational hypothesis, in all experiments, the difference in precue benefits between reward and no-reward conditions was nonsignificant. Collectively, the findings suggest that the effects of motivation on precue benefits are not robust, at least when preparation time is short. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).