Executive Function Theories

520 Reading Summaries #2 The reading this week by Banich (2009) defines executive function, looks at ways to assess executive function, and investigates circumstances that it is compromised. This article describes executive function as the ability to purposely lead behaviors towards reaching a goal. The article notes many cognitive abilities that it believes to be a part of executive function which include how humans prioritize behaviors, inhibit behaviors that are familiar, mental ideas of what is important to a related task, ignoring irrelevant information and more. Executive function, is noted as being compromised in certain populations such as in children, teens, older adults and those with certain psychiatric illnesses. For the elderly,
These tests include the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test to assess inference of categories, creation of mental sets, and task switching. A second test is the Stroop task, which looks at how executive control can override other mental processes. A third task is the Tower of London task which looks at a person's ability to plan and organize behaviors to reach a goal. This article introduces an array of theories that have been used to conceptualize how executive function works as well as the role it plays in cognition. These theories are presented along with the authors own theory with purpose of proposing that the theories need integration to provide clarity, coherence and to better explain executive functioning. The first theory presented sees executive functioning as stemming from other facets of intelligence. A second theory looks from the perspective executive function has distinct sub parts that are different from general
Another theory based in the neural processes believes that executive function is are in the prefrontal cortex, but with clearly defined sections for different abilities. A third theory hypothesis that the preforntal cortex are hierarchically organized depending on the activity. A fourth which used testing, found that patients with lesions in the frontal lobe seemed to show three types of executive function which associate physically to locations in the brain. The researchers in this article proposed that executive function is cascading and that different abilities are are carried out in different ways. The researchers in this article suggest that the prefrontal cortex is associated with attention sets. The mid-DLPFC identifies what is task relevant. Positior ACC is associated with late state selection and sensitivity to response factors.
Anterior regions of the ACC is associated with response evaluation. In the interest of age, older adults have shown less activity in the DLPFC, but more cingulate activity supporting their cascade