Toward a formal theory of proactivity

Beyond merely reacting to their environment and impulses, people have the remarkable capacity to proactively set and pursue their own goals. The extent to which they leverage this capacity varies widely across people and situations. The goal of this article is to propose and evaluate a model of proactivity and reactivity. We proceed in three steps. First, we model proactivity in a widely used cognitive control task known as the AX Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT). Our theory formalizes an important aspect of proactivity as meta-control over proactive and reactive control. Second, we perform a quantitative model comparison to identify the number and nature of meta-control decisions that are involved in the regulation of proactive behavior. Our findings suggest that individual differences in proactivity are governed by two independent meta-control decisions, namely deciding whether to set an intention for what to do in a future situation and deciding whether to recall one’s intentions when the situation occurs. Third, we test the assumptions and qualitative predictions of the winning model against data from numerous experiments varying the incentives, cognitive load, and statistical structure of the task. Our results suggest that proactivity can be understood in terms of computational models of meta-control. Future work will extend our models from proactive control in the AX-CPT to proactive goal creation and goal pursuit in the real world. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13415-021-00884-y.