Executive function

Processes supporting goal-directed control, including maintaining and updating relevant information, inhibiting competing responses and changing task sets. Their importance depends on what a task requires: an initially effortful procedure may need less executive control after practice. The unity-and-diversity framework distinguishes correlated components without equating a single test score with a pure executive capacity.^[ref]

Failure to implement an intended or understood goal when the situation does not adequately trigger it. Preserved performance on highly structured tests can coexist with poor organization of open-ended activities.^[ref]

A rule-discovery and switching task using feedback about Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Performance also depends on learning, human memory, attention and general task demands.

An executive function task necessarily recruits nonexecutive processes as well as its intended control demand. A verbal inhibition task, for example, requires word comprehension and a response. Multiple indicators with different incidental demands can help separate common executive variance, but only under a defensible measurement model.^[ref]

Changing a task set, representation or strategy in response to changing goals or evidence. Switching costs can also reflect working memory, speed and comprehension of the new rule.

Alternating between task rules or response sets. Switch costs compare changing with repeating a rule, but also depend on preparation, competing mappings, cue processing and baseline performance.

Control over prepotent or competing responses. Its operation is task-dependent: following an opposite tapping rule and suppressing irrelevant numerical information share a broad control demand but include different perceptual, linguistic and domain-specific processes.

Control of the influence of an observed action when a different action is required. It can be studied through compatible/incompatible response tasks with separate controls for spatial interference.

A task in which an occasional signal instructs cancellation of an otherwise required response. Successful performance requires detection and interpretation of the signal as well as stopping.

A model-derived estimate of the latency of stopping. It is not directly observed as a movement time, and its interpretation depends on assumptions about the go and stop processes.

An experimenter taps once or twice and the child must produce the opposite count. The task taxes inhibition of imitation together with maintenance of the response rule; its score is not a process-pure measure.^[ref]