LAUSR

&NA; The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) has long been used as a neuropsychological assessment of executive function abilities, in particular, cognitive flexibility or “set‐shifting”. Recent advances in scoring the task have helped to isolate specific WCST performance metrics that index set‐shifting abilities and have improved our understanding of how prefrontal and parietal cortex contribute to set‐shifting. We present evidence that the ability to overcome task difficulty to achieve a goal, or “cognitive persistence”, is another important prefrontal function that is characterized by the WCST and that can be differentiated from efficient set‐shifting. This novel measure of cognitive persistence was developed using the WCST‐64 in an adult lifespan sample of 230 participants. The measure was validated using individual variation in cingulo‐opercular cortex function in a sub‐sample of older adults who had completed a challenging speech recognition in noise fMRI task. Specifically, older adults with higher cognitive persistence were more likely to demonstrate word recognition benefit from cingulo‐opercular activity. The WCST‐derived cognitive persistence measure can be used to disentangle neural processes involved in set‐shifting from those involved in persistence. HighlightsThe Wisconsin Card Sorting Test can measure persistence to overcome task difficulty.Persistence predicts cingulo‐opercular error responses and performance benefits.The new measure can dissociate set‐shifting and persistence.