We describe an ambitious ongoing study that has been strongly influenced and inspired by Don Stuss's career-long efforts to identify key cognitive processes that characterize executive control, investigate potential unifying dimensions that define prefrontal function, and carefully attend to individual differences. The Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control project tests a theoretical framework positing two key control dimensions: proactive and reactive. The framework's central tenets are that proactive and reactive control modes reflect domain-general dimensions of individual variation, with distinctive neural signatures, involving the lateral prefrontal cortex as a central node within associated brain networks (e.g., fronto-parietal, cingulo-opercular). In the Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control project, each participant undergoes three separate imaging sessions, while performing theoretically targeted variants of multiple well-established cognitive control tasks (Stroop, Cued task-switching, AX-Continuous Performance Test, Sternberg working memory) in conditions that encourage utilization of different control modes, and also completes an extensive out-of-scanner individual differences battery. Additional key features of the project include a high spatio-temporal resolution (multiband) acquisition protocol and a sample that includes both a substantial subset of monozygotic twin pairs and participants recruited from the Human Connectome Project. Although data collection is still continuing (target n = 200), we provide an overview of the study design and protocol, along with initial results ( n = 80) revealing evidence of a domain-general neural signature of cognitive control and its modulation under reactive conditions. Aligned with Don Stuss's legacy of scientific community building, a partial data set has been publicly released, with the full data set released at project completion, so it can serve as a valuable resource.

Behavioral evidence suggests that during word processing people spontaneously map object, valence, and power information to locations in vertical space. Specifically, whereas “overhead” (e.g., attic ), positive (e.g., party ), and powerful nouns (e.g., professor ) are associated with “up,” “underfoot” (e.g., carpet ), negative (e.g., accident ), and powerless nouns (e.g., assistant ) are associated with “down.” What has yet to be elucidated, however, is the precise nature of these effects. To explore this issue, an fMRI experiment was undertaken, during which participants were required to categorize the position in which geometrical shapes appeared on a computer screen (i.e., upper or lower part of the display). In addition, they also judged a series of words with regard to location (i.e., up vs. down), valence (i.e., good vs. bad), and power (i.e., powerful vs. powerless). Using multivoxel pattern analysis, it was found that classifiers that successfully distinguished between the positions of shapes in subregions of the inferior parietal lobe also provided discriminatory information to separate location and valence, but not power word judgments. Correlational analyses further revealed that, for location words, pattern transfer was more successful the stronger was participants' propensity to use visual imagery. These findings indicate that visual coding and conceptual processing can elicit common representations of verticality but that divergent mechanisms may support the reported effects.