The puzzle of profitless pre-cues

Despite the intuition that attention can be willfully heightened on demand in response to warnings that alert people to impending distraction (e.g., "Pay attention!"), the empirical evidence for this notion from studies employing congruency pre-cues is surprisingly weak, posing a challenge to some theoretical accounts. Here, we examine this puzzle of profitless pre-cues via the first systematic review of the literature on pre-cues in conflict tasks (e.g., the Stroop task)-a classic instance of proactive cognitive control. We first outline important conceptual and methodological considerations to delineate the process of greatest theoretical and practical importance, namely, the volitional attenuation of distraction when the precise target and distractor features are not known in advance. This is followed by a comprehensive literature review, revealing limited evidence for the effective use of pre-cues to attenuate distraction in conflict tasks (and we note a similar status in adjacent fields, like task switching and visual search). To elucidate this puzzle, we synthesize key findings alongside design parameters employed across studies to develop a novel theoretical framework, called TEPID. TEPID proposes a two-phase model that highlights the interactivity of a small set of task-related factors (preparation time, cue type, response modality, and task type) and person-related factors (motivation and ability) which we believe to be crucial for determining whether pre-cues are exploited to proactively modulate control. From this synthesis, several recommendations and predictions are derived to position the field for future investigations of proactive control using pre-cueing manipulations, as well as their translation to real-life applications.