Behavioral and neural evidence for item-specific performance monitoring

How cognitive control is recruited and implemented has become a major focus of researchers in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Current theories posit that cognitive control operates at the level of general rules - for example, in a Stroop task, "attend to the color of the stimulus." Here we report behavioral evidence suggesting that cognitive control is implemented much more locally, operating at the level of specific stimuli appearing in a task block. In addition, we report neural evidence that many of the regions implicated in cognitive control on the Stroop task, including anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, operate at a local level.