The ability to adapt behavior based on environmental demands is a cornerstone of human cognition. This study investigates the role of foreknowledge—completely reliable pre-cued information about upcoming trial attributes—in aiding action selection. Specifically, it explores how distractor-related foreknowledge, either at the stimulus or response level, influences cognitive performance in conflict scenarios. Prior research predominantly focuses on stimulus-level foreknowledge, examining how it affects auditory and visual tasks. However, the impacts of response-level foreknowledge remain less understood. Our research utilized the Flanker task, a paradigm where a target stimulus is flanked by adjacent stimuli that could be perceptually congruent or incongruent and may require the same or different responses. We manipulated foreknowledge about the identity and response characteristics of distractors. The experiments employed a two-factorial mixed design with foreknowledge (control, identity, response) as a between-subjects factor and compatibility (incompatible, compatible, identical) as a within-subjects factor. Foreknowledge cues were provided before each trial, indicating either the shape or the mapped response of the upcoming distractors. Results from two experiments indicated that both stimulus-level and response-level foreknowledge effectively reduced response interference, aligning with the common coding theory's suggestion of an integral link between stimulus and response representations. Perceptual interference only increased when foreknowledge was provided at the stimulus level.