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Annu Rev Psychol. 2013 ; 64: 135–168. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750.

Executive Functions
Adele Diamond
Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia and BC Children’s Hospital, Vancouver,
BC V6T 2A1 Canada; [email protected]

Abstract
Executive functions (EFs) make possible mentally playing with ideas; taking the time to think
before acting; meeting novel, unanticipated challenges; resisting temptations; and staying focused.
Core EFs are inhibition [response inhibition (self-control—resisting temptations and resisting
acting impulsively) and interference control (selective attention and cognitive inhibition)],
working memory, and cognitive flexibility (including creatively thinking “outside the box,” seeing
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anything from different perspectives, and quickly and flexibly adapting to changed
circumstances). The developmental progression and representative measures of each are discussed.
Controversies are addressed (e.g., the relation between EFs and fluid intelligence, self-regulation,
executive attention, and effortful control, and the relation between working memory and inhibition
and attention). The importance of social, emotional, and physical health for cognitive health is
discussed because stress, lack of sleep, loneliness, or lack of exercise each impair EFs. That EFs
are trainable and can be improved with practice is addressed, including diverse methods tried thus
far.

Keywords
cognitive control; self-regulation; creativity; attention; reasoning; working memory; fluid
intelligence; inhibitory control; task switching; mental flexibility

INTRODUCTION
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Executive functions (EFs; also called executive control or cognitive control) refer to a
family of top-down mental processes needed when you have to concentrate and pay
attention, when going on automatic or relying on instinct or intuition would be ill-advised,
insufficient, or impossible (Burgess & Simons 2005, Espy 2004, Miller & Cohen 2001).
Using EFs is effortful; it is easier to continue doing what you have been doing than to
change, it is easier to give into temptation than to resist it, and it is easier to go on
“automatic pilot” than to consider what to do next. There is general agreement that there are
three core EFs (e.g., Lehto et al. 2003, Miyake et al. 2000): inhibition [inhibitory control,
including self-control (behavioral inhibition) and interference control (selective attention
and cognitive inhibition)], working memory (WM), and cognitive flexibility (also called set

Copyright © 2013 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be
perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
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shifting, mental flexibility, or mental set shifting and closely linked to creativity). From
these, higher-order EFs are built such as reasoning, problem solving, and planning (Collins
& Koechlin 2012, Lunt et al. 2012). EFs are skills essential for mental and physical health;
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success in school and in life; and cognitive, social, and psychological development (see
Table 1).

INHIBITORY CONTROL
Inhibitory control (one of the core EFs) involves being able to control one’s attention,
behavior, thoughts, and/or emotions to override a strong internal predisposition or external
lure, and instead do what’s more appropriate or needed. Without inhibitory control we
would be at the mercy of impulses, old habits of thought or action (conditioned responses),
and/or stimuli in the environment that pull us this way or that. Thus, inhibitory control
makes it possible for us to change and for us to choose how we react and how we behave
rather than being unthinking creatures of habit. It doesn’t make it easy. Indeed, we usually
are creatures of habit and our behavior is under the control of environmental stimuli far
more than we usually realize, but having the ability to exercise inhibitory control creates the
possibility of change and choice. It can also save us from making fools of ourselves.
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Inhibitory control of attention (interference control at the level of perception) enables us to

selectively attend, focusing on what we choose and suppressing attention to other stimuli.
We need such selective attention at a cocktail party when we want to screen out all but one
voice. A salient stimulus such as visual motion or a loud noise attracts our attention whether
we want it to or not. That is called exogenous, bottom-up, automatic, stimulus-driven, or
involuntary attention and is driven by properties of stimuli themselves (Posner &
DiGirolamo 1998, Theeuwes 1991). We can also choose voluntarily to ignore (or inhibit
attention to) particular stimuli and attend to others based on our goal or intention. Besides
being called selective or focused attention, this has been termed attentional control or
attentional inhibition, endogenous, top-down, active, goal-driven, voluntary, volitional, or
executive attention (Posner & DiGirolamo 1998, Theeuwes 2010).

Another aspect of interference control is suppressing prepotent mental representations

(cognitive inhibition). This involves resisting extraneous or unwanted thoughts or memories,
including intentional forgetting (Anderson & Levy 2009), resisting proactive interference
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from information acquired earlier (Postle et al. 2004), and resisting retroactive interference
from items presented later. Cognitive inhibition is usually in the service of aiding WM and
is discussed in the section Inhibitory Control Supports Working Memory. It tends to cohere
more with WM measures than with measures of other types of inhibition.

Self-control is the aspect of inhibitory control that involves control over one’s behavior and
control over one’s emotions in the service of controlling one’s behavior. Self-control is
about resisting temptations and not acting impulsively. The temptation resisted might be to
indulge in pleasures when one should not (e.g., to indulge in a romantic fling if you are
married or to eat sweets if you are trying to lose weight), to overindulge, or to stray from the
straight and narrow (e.g., to cheat or steal). Or the temptation might be to impulsively react
(e.g., reflexively striking back at someone who has hurt your feelings) or to do or take what

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you want without regard for social norms (e.g., butting in line or grabbing another child’s
toy).
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Another aspect of self-control is having the discipline to stay on task despite distractions and
completing a task despite temptations to give up, to move on to more interesting work, or to
have a good time instead. This involves making yourself do something or keep at something
though you would rather be doing something else. It is related to the final aspect of self-
control—delaying gratification (Mischel et al. 1989)—making yourself forgo an immediate
pleasure for a greater reward later (often termed delay discounting by neuroscientists and
learning theorists; Louie & Glimcher 2010, Rachlin et al. 1991). Without the discipline to
complete what one started and delay gratification, no one would ever complete a long, time-
consuming task such as writing a dissertation, running a marathon, or starting a new
business.

Although the above examples typically involve a tug-of-war between a part of you that
wants to do x and another part of you that wants to do y (Hofmann et al. 2009), self-control
can be needed where there are not competing desires. It is needed, for example, to not blurt
out what first comes to mind (which might be hurtful to others or embarrassing to you), to
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not jump to a conclusion before getting all the facts, or to not give the first answer that
occurs to you when if you took more time you could give a better, wiser response.

Errors of impulsivity are errors of not being able to wait. If someone can be helped to wait
such errors can often be avoided. Many of us have had the experience of pressing the “send”
button for an email only to wish we had not. Many of us have also had the experience of our
first interpretation of the intention behind someone’s words or actions being incorrect, and
we have either been grateful we exercised the self-control to wait until we acquired more
information or regretted that we acted precipitously without waiting. On laboratory tasks,
young children often rush to respond and thus make errors by giving the prepotent response
when a different response is required. Helping young children wait improves their
performance. This has been shown using a variety of inhibitory control tasks such as go/no-
go (Jones et al. 2003), theory of mind (Heberle et al. 1999), day-night (Diamond et al.
2002), and a Piagetian search task (Riviere & Lecuyer 2003). The subthalamic nucleus
appears to play a critical role in preventing such impulsive or premature responding (Frank
2006).
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Diamond and colleagues (2002) hypothesized that more time helps in such situations
because young children need time to compute the answer. Simpson & Riggs (2007)
hypothesized that more time helps because it allows the prepotent response (which is
triggered automatically by a stimulus) to race to the response threshold and then fade,
enabling the correct answer to compete more successfully [to do something other than your
prepotent response requires mental effort and reaches the response threshold more slowly
(Figure 1; see Band et al. 2003)]. Diamond, Simpson, and Riggs (Simpson et al. 2012)
teamed up to test between their hypotheses. The results clearly support Simpson and Riggs’s
passive-dissipation hypothesis. In a distraction-during-delay condition, preschoolers were
able to resist opening boxes on no-go trials. They performed well on such trials despite not

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being able to compute anything during the delay because they were occupied with a
guessing game.
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When an incorrect prepotent response is elicited by the sight of a stimulus, individuals can
be helped to perform correctly by shielding the stimulus from view, thus reducing or
eliminating the need for inhibitory control. For example, in Piaget’s famous test of
conservation of liquid volume (Piaget 1952/1941), the same amount of liquid is poured into
a short, fat beaker and a tall, thin beaker. Of course the water level is much higher in the tall,
thin beaker, creating a perceptual pull to think there is more water there. Children of 4 to 5
years, who have just certified that the amount of liquid is the same in two identical short
beakers, fall prey to this perceptual pull. Though they see the liquid poured from one of the
short beakers into the taller, thinner beaker, upon seeing the higher level of liquid in the tall
beaker, they assert there must be more liquid there. However, if they are shielded from
seeing the two different levels of liquid and are simply asked which beaker has more liquid,
children of 4 to 5 years give the correct answer (Bruner et al. 1966).

Similarly, infants have a prepotent tendency to reach directly for a visible reward. If a
transparent barrier is between them and the reward, infants of 6 to 11 months have great
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difficulty inhibiting the perceptual pull to keep trying to reach straight for the reward despite
repeatedly being thwarted by the clear barrier. If the barrier is opaque, thus removing the
perceptual pull, more infants at each age succeed in detouring around the barrier and
succeed in less time (Diamond 1990, 1991). Many adults use a related strategy by
eliminating fattening foods from view when they are trying to diet, thus reducing the degree
of self-control needed.

Representative Psychological Tasks Used to Assess Inhibitory Control

Examples of other psychological measures of inhibitory control include the Stroop task
(MacLeod 1991), Simon task (Hommel 2011), Flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen 1974,
Mullane et al. 2009), antisaccade tasks (Luna 2009, Munoz & Everling 2004), delay-of-
gratification tasks (Kochanska et al. 2001, Sethi et al. 2000), go/no-go tasks (Cragg &
Nation 2008), and stop-signal tasks (Verbruggen & Logan 2008). One of the many hotly
debated aspects of EFs is which component(s) of EFs a task requires. Not everyone agrees
that these tasks require inhibitory control [see, for example, MacLeod et al. (2003) on the
Stroop task and Roberts & Pennington (1996) on the antisaccade task].
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We are trained to read for meaning and to largely ignore superficial characteristics of words
such as font style or color of the ink. Incongruent trials on the Stroop task present color
words (such as “green”) written in the color of another ink (“red”). When required to ignore
the meaning of the word (i.e., inhibit our prepotent response to words) and instead attend to
and report the color of the ink, people are slower and make more errors.

Simon tasks present two very simple rules: for Stimulus A press on the left; for Stimulus B
press on the right. Only one stimulus appears at a time; either stimulus can appear on the
right or the left. Although location of the stimulus is irrelevant, people respond more slowly
when the stimulus appears on the side opposite its associated response (termed the Simon
effect, spatial incompatibility, or stimulus-response compatibility), indicating that we have a

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prepotent tendency to respond on the same side as a stimulus (Hommel 2011, Lu & Proctor
1995). That tendency must be inhibited when the locations of stimulus and response are
opposite (incompatible). Indeed, when monkeys are to point away from a stimulus, the
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neuronal population vector in primary motor cortex (coding the direction of planned
movement) initially points toward the stimulus and only then shifts to the required direction
(showing a prepotent tendency at the neuronal level to respond toward a stimulus; to do
otherwise requires that that impulse be inhibited; Georgopoulos et al. 1989). For comparable
results in humans see Valle-Inclán (1996).

The Spatial Stroop task is similar to a Simon task but minimizes memory demands because
the stimulus shows you where to respond. You are to press in the direction the arrow is
pointing. Sometimes the arrow appears on the side it is pointing toward (congruent,
compatible trials), but sometimes the arrow appears on the other side (incongruent,
incompatible trials). The arrow’s location is irrelevant, but subjects still have a tendency to
press on the side the arrow appears, which must be inhibited when the arrow is pointing in
the opposite direction. A version of the Spatial Stroop task appears in the Cambridge
Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB; Sahakian et al. 1988).
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The Flanker task requires selective attention; you are to attend to the centrally presented
stimulus and ignore the flanking stimuli surrounding it. When the flanking stimuli are
mapped to the opposite response from the center stimulus (incompatible trials), subjects
respond more slowly because of the need to exercise top-down control (Eriksen & Eriksen
1974).

Our natural tendency is to look toward a salient stimulus when it appears (i.e., to make a
prosaccade). On trials where we are instructed to inhibit that tendency and instead do the
opposite (i.e., to look away from the stimulus, to make an antisaccade), we are slower and
more prone to err (Munoz & Everling 2004). This task is sensitive to developmental
improvements throughout late childhood and adolescence (Luna 2009, Luna et al. 2004).

Delay-of-gratification tasks involve placing a delicious snack before young children and
asking that they wait before taking it. Children can have more of the treat if they wait, or
less if they can’t wait. Each child is tested individually. Retesting is difficult because it is
critical that the child not know how long the wait will be. This task seems to predict
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children’s EFs and academic performance at much later ages (Eigsti et al. 2006).

Two widely used measures of response inhibition—the go/no-go and stop-signal tasks—are
different from other measures in that participants do not inhibit one response to make
another; they simply inhibit a response to do nothing. Go/no-go tasks require that you
usually press a button when a stimulus appears, but when a certain stimulus appears you
should not press. On the stop-signal task, the go signal is presented on all trials; on a
minority of trials after the go signal and just as the subject is about to respond, a stop signal
appears (usually a sound), indicating that one should not press the button on that trial. Real-
world analogies of checking an action that was just on the verge of being made would be
when a situation, or your evaluation of it, suddenly changes such as when you are about to
cross the street and the light suddenly changes or a batter checks a swing. The go/no-go and

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stop-signal tasks are not identical in their inhibitory requirements (Verbruggen & Logan
2008) and differ from many real-world instances of inhibitory control (Aron 2011). Rather
than being paradigmatic examples of when inhibitory control is needed, they appear to be
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unusual cases.

Commonalities and Differences Among Diverse Forms of Inhibitory Control

Are the different aspects of inhibitory control dissociable from one another? Is the same
neural system required to resist internal and external distractions? Is the neural system that
subserves cognitive inhibition the same as that subserving inhibition of attention and/or
action? Is the neural system that subserves inhibition in attention (interference control/
selective attention) the same neural system that subserves inhibition in action (inhibiting a
prepotent response tendency)? Certainly the forms of inhibition seem quite disparate (Nigg
2000). Yet evidence indicates that diverse types of inhibitory control of attention and action
appear to share substantially similar neural bases (Bunge et al. 2002, Cohen et al. 2012).
Cognitive inhibition, however, appears to be dissociable (Engelhardt et al. 2008, Friedman
& Miyake 2004). There is some emerging evidence that delay of gratification might be
dissociable as well (Diamond & Lee 2011).
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Factor analyses have found that inhibition of attention (resisting distractor interference) and
inhibition of action (inhibiting a prepotent response) are strongly correlated and fall along a
single factor (Friedman & Miyake 2004). It is consistently found that when required to exert
one type of self-control (e.g., resisting sweets), and then immediately after a second type of
self-control in a superficially completely unrelated domain (e.g., the stop-signal task),
people are more impaired on the second task than if they did a different difficult task first
that did not require self-control (e.g., math calculations; Muraven 2010, Muraven &
Baumeister 2000).

Is the neural system required to inhibit an action and not act at all (e.g., on no-go trials) the
same as the system required to inhibit one action to do another? Petrides (1986) and de Jong
et al. (1995) suggest it is not. Is the neural system that underlies the ability to inhibit an
unwanted action the same as the system underlying the ability to check a desired action
(e.g., as in not swinging at a poorly pitched ball or as on the stop-signal task)? Do all of
these forms of inhibition develop concurrently, and are they equally susceptible to disruption
because of a particular genetic abnormality or environmental insult during development? If
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they are separable, how are we to divide them into components (Casey 2001, Nigg 2000)?
Certainly automatic inhibition (such as that seen in the attentional blink or negative priming)
is dissociable from the volitional, effortful inhibitory control discussed here (Carr et al.
2006, Nigg et al. 2002), and although effortful inhibition declines with aging, it is unclear
whether automatic inhibition does (Gamboz et al. 2002).

Development of Inhibitory Control

Inhibitory control is disproportionately difficult for young children. For example, the
difference in both the speed and accuracy of children’s performance at all ages from 4 to 9
between (a) always responding on the same side as a stimulus and (b) inhibiting that
prepotent tendency and always responding on the side opposite a stimulus is greater than the

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difference in their speed or accuracy for (a) holding two stimulus-response associations in
mind versus (b) holding six stimulus-response associations in mind (Davidson et al. 2006;
see Figure 2). That’s true whether the same-side trials come before or after the opposite-side
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ones (Wright & Diamond 2012). The reverse is true for adults. It is far harder for us to hold
six associations in mind than only two, but it is no harder for us to always respond on the
side opposite a stimulus than to always respond on the same side as a stimulus (our speed
and accuracy for each are equivalent; Davidson et al. 2006, Lu & Proctor 1995). Inhibitory
control continues to mature during adolescence (Luna 2009, Luna et al. 2004).

Inhibitory control early in life appears to be quite predictive of outcomes throughout life,
including in adulthood. When 1,000 children born in the same city in the same year were
followed for 32 years with a 96% retention rate, Moffitt et al. (2011) found that children
who at ages 3 to 11 had better inhibitory control (e.g., were better at waiting their turn, less
easily distracted, more persistent, and less impulsive) were more likely as teenagers to still
be in school and were less likely to make risky choices or to be smoking or taking drugs.
They grew up to have better physical and mental health (e.g., were less likely to be
overweight or to have high blood pressure or substance abuse problems), earn more, and be
more law-abiding as adults 30 years later than were those with worse inhibitory control as
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children, controlling for IQ, gender, social class, and their home lives and family
circumstances growing up. They were also happier as adults (Moffitt 2012).

Inhibitory control declines noticeably during normal aging, however (Hasher & Zacks 1988,
Hasher et al. 1991). For example, older adults are poor at inhibiting visual distractions
(Darowski et al. 2008, Gazzaley et al. 2005) and auditory distractions (Alain & Woods
1999, Barr & Giambra 1990). Older adults show normal enhancement of the to-be-attended
stimuli, but less or even no suppression of the stimuli to be ignored (Gazzaley et al. 2005),
providing rather strong evidence of an inhibitory-control deficit in aging. No matter whether
participants are prepared for distraction or not, and regardless of how long the period
between the forewarning and stimuli or how long the interval between trials, older adults are
substantially worse than younger adults in suppressing irrelevant information (Zanto et al.
2010). Older adults’ inhibitory-control problems are also evident on the antisaccade task
(Peltsch et al. 2011, Sweeney et al. 2001).

WORKING MEMORY
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Another core EF is working memory (WM), which involves holding information in mind
and mentally working with it (or said differently, working with information no longer
perceptually present; Baddeley & Hitch 1994, Smith & Jonides 1999). The two types of
WM are distinguished by content—verbal WM and nonverbal (visual-spatial) WM. WM is
critical for making sense of anything that unfolds over time, for that always requires holding
in mind what happened earlier and relating that to what comes later. Thus it is necessary for
making sense of written or spoken language whether it is a sentence, a paragraph, or longer.
Doing any math in your head requires WM, as does mentally reordering items (such as
reorganizing a to-do list), translating instructions into action plans, incorporating new
information into your thinking or action plans (updating), considering alternatives, and
mentally relating information to derive a general principle or to see relations between items

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or ideas. Reasoning would not be possible without WM. WM is critical to our ability to see
connections between seemingly unrelated things and to pull apart elements from an
integrated whole, and hence to creativity because creativity involves disassembling and
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recombining elements in new ways. WM also enables us to bring conceptual knowledge and
not just perceptual input to bear on our decisions, and to consider our remembered past and
future hopes in making plans and decisions.

Working Memory Versus Short-Term Memory

WM (holding information in mind and manipulating it) is distinct from short-term memory
(just holding information in mind). They cluster onto separate factors in factor analyses of
children, adolescents, and adults (Alloway et al. 2004, Gathercole et al. 2004). They are
linked to different neural subsystems. WM relies more on dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,
whereas maintaining information in mind but not manipulating it [as long as the number of
items is not huge (suprathreshold)] does not need involvement of dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex (D’Esposito et al. 1999, Eldreth et al. 2006, Smith & Jonides 1999). Imaging studies
show frontal activation only in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex for memory maintenance that
is not suprathreshold.
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WM and short-term memory also show different developmental progressions; the latter
develops earlier and faster. A Simon task (described above) requires that subjects remember
two rules (for Stimulus 1 press on the right; for Stimulus 2 press on the left). A super-ficially
similar task, originally called the Dots task and later renamed the Hearts and Flowers task,
also requires that subjects remember two rules (for Stimulus 1 press on the same side as the
stimulus; for Stimulus 2 press on the side opposite the stimulus; Davidson et al. 2006,
Diamond et al. 2007). Whereas the memory component of the Simon task requires only
holding information in mind, note that WM is required for the Dots task because the
instruction to use the hand on the same or opposite side as the stimulus must be translated
into whether to use the right or left hand. The rules must not only be held in mind but also
mentally translated or transformed. Comparing performance on the Simon and Dots tasks
across age provides a clear view of the additional toll that WM versus short-term memory
exacts for children at least through ages 4 to 13 and for adults (see Figure 3; Davidson et al.
2006).
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Relations Between Working Memory and Inhibitory Control

They generally need one another and co-occur—One prototypical instance of when
EFs are needed is the class of situations where you are to act counter to your initial tendency
on the basis of information held in mind. WM and inhibitory control support one another
and rarely, if ever, is one needed but not the other.

Working memory supports inhibitory control—You must hold your goal in mind to
know what is relevant or appropriate and what to inhibit. By concentrating especially hard
on the information you are holding in mind, you increase the likelihood that that information
will guide your behavior, and you decrease the likelihood of an inhibitory error (mistakenly
emitting the default, or normally prepotent, response when it should have been inhibited).

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Using visual cues to help young children remember what they were just told can markedly
improve their inhibitory control performance. For example, a school program for 4- to 5-
year-olds called Tools of the Mind uses visual aids in an activity called Buddy Reading
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(Bodrova & Leong 2007). Each child chooses a picture book, pairs up with another child,
and they are to take turns telling the story that goes with their book. With each child eager to
tell his or her story, no one wants to listen. To help children succeed at inhibitory control,
teachers use a visual memory aid, handing one child in each pair a drawing of an ear,
explaining, “Ears don’t talk; ears listen.” With that concrete reminder, the child with the ear
inhibits talking and listens. Without it, the child would not be able to do that. After a few
months, the picture is no longer needed; the child has internalized the reminder.

Inhibitory control supports working memory—To relate multiple ideas or facts

together you must be able to resist focusing exclusively on just one thing, and to recombine
ideas and facts in new, creative ways you need to be able to resist repeating old thought
patterns. To keep your mind focused on what you want to focus on you must inhibit internal
and external distractions. When such inhibition fails, your mind may wander. Many of us are
familiar with suddenly realizing that we don’t know what was in the passage we supposedly
just read because our mind was elsewhere (it had wandered). Several studies have explored
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such mind-wandering (e.g., Kane et al. 2007, Mason et al. 2007, Smallwood & Schooler
2009). Meditation is reported to reduce mind-wandering by disciplining the mind in the art
of staying focused (Hölzel et al. 2011, Zeidan et al. 2010). Inhibitory control can also aid
WM by helping to keep our mental workspace from becoming too cluttered by suppressing
extraneous thoughts (i.e., gating out irrelevant information from the WM workspace),
resisting proactive interference by deleting no-longer-relevant information from that limited-
capacity workspace (Hasher & Zacks 1988, Zacks & Hasher 2006). Hasher and Zacks group
cognitive inhibition under WM. As noted above, they may be right that inhibition in the
service of protecting the mental workspace for WM is intrinsically allied with WM.

An excellent example of not cluttering one’s WM space unnecessarily can be seen with an
interesting test developed by Duncan et al. (2008). One group of subjects is instructed on
two tasks (a letter task and a number task) and then told they can ignore the number task for
the time being because they will only be doing the letter task now. Another group is
instructed only on the letter task. The stimuli are presented in two columns. Subjects are
instructed that when they see a plus sign they should attend to the column on the right, while
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a minus sign means attend to the column on the left. When asked before or after testing, all
subjects correctly recall what they should do for a plus or minus sign. Everyone obeys those
rules perfectly when instructed on only one task. However, when instructed on two tasks,
individuals with worse EFs often fail to switch columns when they should. Almost all
participants who scored >1 standard deviation below the population mean on a reasoning
measure of EFs neglected to observe the plus- and minus-sign rules. Almost no one scoring
above the mean on the EF measure did so.

Why would persons with poorer EFs obey the plus- and minus-sign rules when instructed on
only one task but ignore them when performing exactly the same task after initially being
instructed on a second task they are told to ignore? Presumably it is because they failed to
clear the irrelevant task from their mental workspace (they failed to inhibit or suppress it),

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and so it was cluttering up their limited-capacity WM. In neither condition do they fail to
remember the plus- and minus-sign rules; it is simply that in the more-complete instruction
condition they fail to act according to those rules.
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If the source of their problem is, as we suspect, trying to hold more in WM than is
necessary, it is reminiscent of problems young children have. By 10 to 12 months, infants
can successfully retrieve an object they see hidden first at Place A and then at Place B even
after a five-second delay between hiding and retrieval (A-not-B task; Diamond 1985). Not
until a year and a half later do toddlers reliably retrieve an object when they see it placed
inside a container and then see that container hidden at Place A and then at Place B with a
five-second delay between hiding and retrieval (A-not-B with invisible displacement;
Diamond et al. 1997). For adults the two tasks are comparable—remember whether the
reward was hidden at A or B on this trial. It appears that infants try to hold too much in mind
when faced with invisible displacement (i.e., that the toy is in the container, and the
container was hidden at A or B).

Performance of adults with poorer EFs on the Duncan et al. task is also reminiscent of 3-
year-olds on the Dimensional Change Card Sort task (Zelazo et al. 1996). Children of 3
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years can sort flawlessly by either color or shape, but when instructed to switch the
dimension they are sorting by, they continue to sort by the first dimension. Yet, if you ask
them, they can tell you that the second dimension is now relevant, what it is, and how to sort
by it (Cepeda & Munakata 2007, Zelazo et al. 1996). It is not that they have forgotten which
dimension is relevant or how to sort by it (just as adults with poorer EFs have not forgotten
the plus- and minus-sign rules). It is simply that members of neither group use that
information to guide their behavior.

Disentangling working memory and inhibitory control—If WM and inhibitory

control are so intertwined, is it never possible to ask research questions specific to one or the
other? No, it is possible. The influence of either WM or inhibitory control can be minimized
or controlled for. For example, on the Hearts and Flowers (previously known as the Dots)
task, the congruent and incongruent blocks both involve holding one rule in mind. They
differ only in the inhibitory demand present in the incongruent block. Counterbalancing
order of presentation of the two blocks (to control for possible order or switching effects),
poorer performance on the incongruent block provides an indication of the cost of having to
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inhibit the prepotent tendency to respond on the same side as the stimulus, controlling for
memory demands. A Spatial Stroop task places minimal demands on memory because the
stimuli themselves tell you where to respond (eyes looking left or right, or arrows pointing
left or right), so performance costs in the incongruent condition of a Spatial Stroop task
should primarily be due to difficulty inhibiting the prepotent tendency to respond on the
same side as the stimulus.

Conversely, reordering items one has heard according to a rule (e.g., alphabetical or
numerical order, size, or distance from a point) requires little attentional or response
inhibition and so is a relatively pure measure of WM (plus cognitive inhibition). Comparing
performance on the Hearts and Flowers task with a control version (“When the eyes look
straight down, press on the same side as the stimulus”; “When the eyes look diagonally to

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the opposite side, press on the opposite side as the stimulus”) enables one to determine the
performance cost of having to use WM versus just looking at the stimulus to see where to
respond.
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Is successful inhibitory control but a result of good working memory?—There

is disagreement among EF researchers over whether inhibition is separate from WM or
whether inhibition is a behavioral product of exercising WM, not a separate cognitive skill.
A third view is that WM and inhibition depend on the same limited-capacity system so that
increasing the demand on either affects one’s ability to do the other (e.g., Engle & Kane
2004, Wais & Gazzaley 2011). The view that WM is primary and inhibitory control
derivative has a number of supporters (e.g., Egner & Hirsch 2005, Hanania & Smith 2010,
Nieuwenhuis & Yeung 2005). That view is held universally among those who do
computational modeling (Miller & Cohen 2001, Munakata et al. 2011). Activation alone is
seen as sufficient; there is no need to posit suppression or inhibition. If you are holding your
goal firmly enough in mind, you will act appropriately. Representation of one’s goal can be
more or less robust in WM; when it is weak or fuzzy, one’s prepotent behavioral inclination
might win out in competition with it (e.g., Munakata et al. 2011).
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Other researchers find empirically that suppression (inhibitory control) and enhancement
(activation of goals in WM) are indeed dissociable (e.g., Davidson et al. 2006, Gernsbacher
& Faust 1991, Zanto et al. 2011). For example, when one stimulus is superimposed on
another, and subjects are instructed to attend to stimuli in the outer layer, ignoring the
background stimuli, older adults show normal enhancement of the to-be-attended stimuli but
little or no suppression of the to-be-ignored stimuli, leading Zanto et al. (2011) to conclude
that enhancement and suppression rely on distinct mechanisms, that “suppression is not
simply lack of enhancement” (p. 660). The debate continues.

One type of failure of EFs is action slips, where we intend to do one thing but do something
else instead (the usual, habitual, or most easily elicited action). On such occasions it is as if
we let ourselves run on automatic when we should have been paying attention (when we
should have been exercising our EFs). Examples would be (a) dialing a friend’s old phone
number when you know your friend has a new number and probably even reminded yourself
when you sat down to call or (b) wanting to diverge from your normal route home to do an
errand but find that you have driven past the turning point and are headed straight for home.
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A large proportion of absent-minded errors actually take the form of intact, well-
organized segments of skilled action that are suitable for the environmental context
most of the time, but not when changed circumstances require some alteration of
normal practice (Reason & Mycielska 1982, pp. 39–40).

Such slips appear to be due to not attending to the goal you are holding in mind. You know
perfectly well what you meant to do. If asked, you can immediately state the goal. For a few
moments or longer, however, your attention wondered, and without any top-down
instructions to do otherwise, you simply did the usual.

The cause of such action errors seems fundamentally different from other instances when
people appear to act counter to their intent. One example might be eating luscious chocolate

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cake when you want to lose weight. When I’ve done this, there was no temporary lapse in
attending to the goal of losing weight; I had that clearly in mind. However, there were two
competing goals, and chocolate-now won out over weight-loss-later. A different type of
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example might be impulsively reacting so quickly that your words or actions come out
before top-down control can inhibit them and generate a more considered response (see
Figure 1 above). These types of action errors do not seem to arise from a WM lapse or
deficit.

Theories of working memory that incorporate aspects of inhibitory control

under what is called working memory—Although EF researchers refer to WM as a
subcomponent of EFs, many working-memory researchers use the term WM far more
broadly so that it becomes roughly synonymous with EFs. For example, Engle and Kane
define WM as the ability to (a) maintain selected information in an active, easily retrievable
state while (b) inhibiting (blocking) distractors and interference (i.e., short-term memory +
interference control at the attentional and cognitive levels; Conway & Engle 1994; Kane &
Engle 2000, 2002). Functions of the central executive in Baddeley’s working-memory
model (Baddeley & Hitch 1994) include inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility: (a)
multitasking, (b) shifting between tasks or retrieval strategies, and (c) the capacity to attend
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and inhibit in a selective manner. My own preference would be to reserve the term WM to
mean only holding information in mind and working with it (working with information not
perceptually present).

Working Memory and Selective, Focused Attention

Focusing on information held in mind for several seconds might as easily be called keeping
your attention focused on those mental contents for several seconds. WM and selective,
focused attention appear to be similar in many ways, including neural basis. The
prefrontalparietal system that supports WM, enabling us to selectively remain focused on
information held in mind, tuning out irrelevant thoughts, overlaps substantially with the
prefrontal parietal system that helps us selectively attend to stimuli in our environment,
tuning out irrelevant stimuli (e.g., Awh et al. 2000, Awh & Jonides 2001, Gazzaley & Nobre
2012, Ikkai & Curtis 2011, LaBar et al. 1999, Nobre & Stokes 2011). Simulations have
demonstrated that developmental improvements in WM can support developmental
improvements in selective attention (Stedron et al. 2005). People are quicker to notice, and
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respond to, stimuli in a location they are holding in WM, and if forced to orient their
attention away from a location they are trying to hold in WM, their memory accuracy suffers
(Awh & Jonides 2001, Kuo et al. 2012, Wais et al. 2010).

Representative Psychological Tasks Used to Assess Working Memory

Forward-digit span tasks (repeat back items in the order in which you heard them) are a
measure of short-term memory, not WM, as they only require holding information in mind.
Backward-digit span (say the items back in reverse order) comes closer to being a WM task
unless a person can see in his or her mind the items that were said and simply read them off
from last to first. Asking subjects to reorder the items they have heard is an excellent WM
measure. It might be repeating the numbers they have just heard (perhaps 6, 9, 4, 7) in
numerical order (4, 6, 7, 9), repeating items back reordered by size (e.g., reordering cat,

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elephant, ant, tiger into the order ant, cat, tiger, elephant), or reordered by distance from
points A and B to make the most efficient route. Here, A might be work and B might be
home, and the items might be grocers, cleaners, gas station, and post office.
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A widely used measure of visual-spatial WM is the Corsi Block test (Lezak 1983). A subject
watches the tester touch a series of blocks, then the subject is to touch the blocks in the same
order. A computerized version of this and of backward digit span appears in the Automated
Working Memory Assessment (AWMA) battery (Alloway 2007, Alloway et al. 2009). It has
been standardized on 1,470 children ages 5 to 6 years and 1,719 children ages 8 to 9 years
(Alloway et al. 2009), and it has excellent construct validity. Another computerized variant
of the Corsi Block task appears as part of the CANTAB battery, normed for children
through adults (Luciana & Nelson 2002, Robbins et al. 1998). This does not really require
mental manipulation. Bialystok’s lab has developed a version that requires reordering (hence
manipulation; Feng et al. 2007).

In the Self-Ordered Pointing task devised by Petrides (Petrides et al. 1993, Petrides &
Milner 1982), subjects see from 3 to 12 items (which might be line drawings, abstract
designs, or boxes containing rewards) and are asked to touch one item at a time, in any
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order, without repeating a choice, making sure to touch all. When rewards are hidden,
subjects get feedback after each choice because after having found the reward in a box once,
the box will be empty for the rest of that trial. Remembering which items you have touched
by their identity is tested by items that are each different from one another, their locations
randomly scrambled after each reach (computerized by Diamond et al. 2004). Remembering
which items you have touched by their spatial location is tested by using identical items that
remain stationary (e.g., Diamond et al. 1997, Wiebe et al. 2010). The CANTAB battery
offers a computerized version of the spatial-identity version. Although this task undoubtedly
depends on dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [as studies with lesioned monkeys (Petrides 1995),
brain-damaged human adults (Owen et al. 1996), and functional neuroimaging in healthy
adults (Petrides et al. 1993) have clearly shown], it is not sensitive to the level of dopamine
in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Collins et al. 1998; Diamond et al. 1997, 2004), although
other EF tasks that depend on dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are sensitive to that.

To study WM, researchers often use complex span tasks, also called WM span tasks, such as
counting span or reading span (Barrouillet et al. 2009, Case 1995, Conway et al. 2005,
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Daneman & Carpenter 1980), but since these tasks often require more subcomponents of
EFs than just holding information in mind and manipulating it, they are really EF measures
rather than measures of the working-memory subcomponent alone. N-back tasks (also called
AX Continuous Performance Tasks, or AX-CPTs) are also often used to assess WM (Owen
et al. 2005, Verhaeghen & Basak 2005), although they too require high levels of selective
and sustained attention. It would probably cause less confusion if all of these measures were
called EF tasks.

Development of Working Memory

The ability to hold information in mind develops very early; even infants and young children
can hold one or two things in mind for quite a long time (Diamond 1995, Nelson et al.
2012). Infants of only 9 to 12 months can update the contents of their WM, as seen on tasks

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such as A-not-B (Bell & Cuevas 2012, Diamond 1985). However, being able to hold many
things in mind or do any kind of mental manipulation (e.g., reordering mental
representations of objects by size) is far slower to develop and shows a prolonged
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developmental progression (Cowan et al. 2002, 2011; Crone et al. 2006; Davidson et al.
2006; Luciana et al. 2005).

WM declines during aging (e.g., Fiore et al. 2012, Fournet et al. 2012). Much of that appears
to be due to declining inhibitory control making older adults more vulnerable to proactive
and retroactive interference (Hedden & Park 2001, Solesio-Jofre et al. 2012) and to
distraction (Rutman et al. 2010, Zanto & Gazzaley 2009). Remember that young children,
too, are disproportionately challenged by inhibition compared to young adults (Davidson et
al. 2006). Improved ability to inhibit interference appears critical to age-related
improvements in WM in children (Hale et al. 1997), just as impaired ability to inhibit
interference may underlie WM decline in older adults.

Decline in WM with aging and improvement in WM during development are also highly
correlated with decline in speed of processing with aging and its improvement during early
development (older adults: Rozas et al. 2008, Salthouse 1992, Zimprich & Kurtz 2012;
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children: Case et al. 1982, Fry & Hale 2000). How to understand the relation between speed
of processing and EFs is controversial; the direction of causality might go either way, or a
third factor might be causal for both and hence their correlation (Diamond 2002).

COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY
Cognitive flexibility (the third core EF) builds on the other two and comes in much later in
development (Davidson et al. 2006, Garon et al. 2008). One aspect of cognitive flexibility is
being able to change perspectives spatially (e.g., “What would this look like if I viewed it
from a different direction?”) or interpersonally (e.g., “Let me see if I can see this from your
point of view”). To change perspectives, we need to inhibit (or deactivate) our previous
perspective and load into WM (or activate) a different perspective. It is in this sense that
cognitive flexibility requires and builds on inhibitory control and WM. Another aspect of
cognitive flexibility involves changing how we think about something (thinking outside the
box). For example, if one way of solving a problem isn’t working, can we come up with a
new way of attacking this or conceiving of this that hadn’t been considered before?
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Cognitive flexibility also involves being flexible enough to adjust to changed demands or
priorities, to admit you were wrong, and to take advantage of sudden, unexpected
opportunities. Suppose you were planning to do X, but an amazing opportunity arose to do
Y: Do you have the flexibility to take advantage of serendipity?

When a student isn’t grasping a concept, we often blame the student: “If only the student
were brighter, he or she would have grasped what I’m trying to teach.” We could be flexible
and consider a different perspective: “What might I, the teacher, do differently? How can I
present the material differently, or word the question differently, so this student can
succeed?”

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There is much overlap between cognitive flexibility and creativity, task switching, and set
shifting. Cognitive flexibility is the opposite of rigidity.
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Representative Psychological Tasks Used to Assess Cognitive Flexibility

A family of tasks that taps cognitive flexibility includes design fluency (also called the
unusual uses task), verbal fluency, and category (or semantic) fluency. You might be asked,
for example, how many uses you can think of for a table or how many words you can think
of that begin with the letter F, or you might be asked to alternate between the names of
animals and the names of foods (Baldo et al. 2001, Baldo & Shimamura 1997, Chi et al.
2012, Van der Elst et al. 2011). First the most common answers come to mind, such as you
can eat or write on a table, but then more flexibly minded or creative people can come up
with other uses such as dancing on a table, getting under it to stay dry, standing it on its side
and using it as shield, chopping it up for firewood, or using it as a percussion instrument.

Cognitive flexibility is often investigated using any of a wide array of task-switching and
set-shifting tasks. The oldest of these is probably the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (Milner
1964, Stuss et al. 2000), one of the classic tests of prefrontal cortex function. Each card in
this test can be sorted by color, shape, or number. The task for the participant is to deduce
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the correct sorting criterion on the basis of feedback and to flexibly switch sorting rules
whenever the experimenter gives feedback that the sorting criterion has changed.

Most task-switching paradigms involve two tasks. Those tasks might be indicating whether
(a) a letter is a vowel or consonant, (b) a number is even or odd (e.g., Monsell 2003), (c) a
stimulus is on the left or right or in the upper or lower quadrant (e.g., Meiran 1996), or (d) a
stimulus is one color or another or one shape or another (e.g., Allport & Wylie 2000). Most
task-switching tasks involve pressing a key on the right or left, with each key mapped to one
feature of each task (e.g., left might be for a consonant or an even number and right for a
vowel or an odd number). The stimuli in most task-switching tasks are bivalent, that is, they
have a feature relevant to each of the two tasks, and the correct response for one task is
incorrect for the other (e.g., for the stimulus “A2,” the correct response for the letter task
would be to press right because A is a vowel, whereas the correct response for the number
task would be to press left because 2 is an even number).

Zelazo and colleagues developed perhaps the simplest possible test of task switching
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(Zelazo et al. 1996, 2003). The stimuli are bivalent, and the correct response for one task is
incorrect for the other, but only one switch occurs during the entire test [called the
Dimensional Change Card Sort Test (DCCS)]. First, one is to sort all six cards by one
dimension (color or shape), and then one is to sort all the cards according to the other
dimension. Memory demands are intentionally minimized by an illustration at each response
location of the features mapped to that response and by the experimenter reminding the child
of the current sorting criterion on each trial. Children of 3 years can flawlessly sort by either
color or shape, but fail to switch even though they know the other dimension is now relevant
and they know the rules for sorting by it. Errors seem to occur because of difficulty in
inhibiting or overcoming what might be termed “attentional inertia,” the tendency to
continue to focus attention on what had previously been relevant (Kirkham et al. 2003, Kloo
& Perner 2005; recently modeled by Chatham et al. 2012). Once a child of 3 has focused on

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the “redness” of a red truck, it’s difficult for the child to switch mindsets and focus on its
“truckness.” The child gets stuck in the previous way of thinking about the stimuli. Indeed,
in young children, activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is first driven by the previous
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trial’s rule (Wendelken et al. 2012), much as noted above for the neuronal population vector
in motor cortex (Georgopoulos et al. 1989), requiring that the prepotent tendency be
inhibited.

That inertial tendency never completely disappears. Traces of it can be seen in the
heightened reaction times of healthy, young adults when required to switch and respond on
the basis of another dimension (e.g., Diamond & Kirkham 2005, Monsell & Driver 2000).
No matter how much warning adults are given about which dimension will be relevant on
the upcoming trial, how long the period between the forewarning and when the stimulus
appears, or how long the period between trials, adults are slower to respond on trials where
the relevant dimension switches than on nonswitch trials (Allport & Wylie 2000, Meiran
1996, Rogers & Monsell 1995). What drives this difference on switch and nonswitch trials is
the subset of switch trials where the rule changes (which aspect of the stimulus is relevant
changes) but where you should respond does not change. We seem to like everything to stay
the same (rule and response site) or everything to change (if the rule changes, we’re faster if
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the response site also changes; Crone et al. 2006, Diamond 2009).

Many other tasks tap similar inertial tendencies such as ambiguous figures where, depending
on how you look at a line drawing, you might see a vase or the profiles of two faces, for
example. Even when informed of the alternatives in an ambiguous figure, 3-year-olds
remain stuck in their initial way of perceiving it; they cannot switch perspectives, just as
they cannot switch sorting dimensions (Gopnik & Rosati 2001). By age 41/2 to 5 years,
most children can see both figures in an ambiguous figure and can switch sorting
dimensions on the DCCS task (Diamond 2002).

Not until 7 to 9 years of age, however, can children switch flexibly on a trial-by-trial basis as
all standard task-switching paradigms require (Davidson et al. 2006, Gupta et al. 2009). For
adults, it is trivially easy to execute a block of one task and a block of the other. Even when
one of the tasks asks you to do something counter to your prepotent tendency it is not that
hard for adults to get in the groove of doing that over a block of trials. Indeed, adults show
no cost at all of always responding across a block of trials on the side opposite to where a
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stimulus appears (Davidson et al. 2006, Lu & Proctor 1995). It’s not that demanding for
adults to keep doing what they’ve been doing, even if it is counterintuitive or counter to their
initial inclination; after a while it requires little top-down control. What’s far more difficult
is switching back and forth between mental sets. Simply put, it is easier to inhibit a
dominant response all the time than only some of the time. Cognitive flexibility, overcoming
inertial tendencies so you can switch back and forth between mental sets or ways of thinking
about the stimuli, is one of the most demanding of the EFs.

A Flanker effect 6 to 10 times larger than what all labs report is obtained simply by having
subjects switch between focusing on the center stimulus and focusing on the Flankers,
assessing the Flanker effect only on trials where subjects are to focus on the same place they
focused on the previous trial (i.e., nonswitch trials). Moreover, in the mixed block the

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Flanker effect (on nonswitch trials) is robust in the face of variations in stimulus parameters
(such as size), unlike the Flanker effect in the standard single-task block (Munro et al.
2006).
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Development of Cognitive Flexibility

A very easy type of switching involves continuing to focus on the same dimension (on the
same aspect of the stimuli) but reversing the stimulus-response mappings. This is called
reversal, within-dimension switching, or intradimensional shifting (e.g., Kendler & Kendler
1959, Kendler et al. 1972, Roberts et al. 1988). For example, in Task 1 you might press left
for circle and right for triangle, while in Task 2 that would be reversed, so you’d press right
for circle and left for triangle. Children only 2½ years of age can succeed at such tasks
(Brooks et al. 2003, Perner & Lang 2002). The ability to change where you respond (switch
stimulus-response mappings, as on reversal tasks) develops earlier than the ability to change
how you think about the stimuli or change what aspect of the stimuli you attend to. Although
children cannot usually succeed at the DCCS task until 4½ to 5 years of age (see above), if
color is a property of the background of the card rather than of the shape pictured on the
card (so a truck is always a truck and the background is always red, instead of the shape
itself being colored so that from one perspective a truck is a truck but from another
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perspective it is a red thing), children can succeed by 3 to 3½ years of age (Diamond et al.
2005, Kloo & Perner 2005).

Task switching improves during child development and declines during aging (Cepeda et al.
2001, Kray 2006). Older adults slow down on a mixed block (where on any trial it might be
Task 1 or Task 2), hence the difference in their speed on mixed blocks versus single-task
blocks is much greater than that of young adults, but unlike young adults they are almost as
slow on repeat trials in a mixed block as on switch trials (Kray & Lindenberger 2000, Mayr
& Liebscher 2001, Meiran & Gotler 2001). Children show much larger differences in their
speed (like older adults) and accuracy (unlike older adults) on mixed blocks versus single-
task blocks than do young adults (Cepeda et al. 2001, Cohen et al. 2001).

Young children and older adults tend to exercise EFs in response to environmental demands
(reactively), whereas older children and young adults tend to be more planful and
anticipatory (recruiting EFs proactively; Czernochowski et al. 2010, Karayanidis et al. 2011,
Munakata et al. 2012).
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A HIGHER-ORDER EXECUTIVE FUNCTION: RELATIONAL REASONING/

LOGICAL REASONING/FLUID INTELLIGENCE
Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason, problem solve, and to see patterns or relations
among items (Ferrer et al. 2009). It includes both inductive and deductive logical reasoning.
It involves being able to figure out the abstract relations underlying analogies. It is
synonymous with the reasoning and problem-solving subcomponents of EFs (see Figure 4).
No surprise then that measures of fluid intelligence [e.g., Raven’s Matrices (Raven 2000)]
are highly correlated with independent measures of EFs (Conway et al. 2003, Duncan et al.
2008, Kane & Engle 2002, Roca et al. 2010).

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DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES BETWEEN EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS

AND RELATED TERMS
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Self-regulation refers to processes that enable us to maintain optimal levels of emotional,

motivational, and cognitive arousal (Eisenberg et al. 2007, Liew 2011). It refers primarily to
control and regulation of one’s emotions (Eisenberg et al. 2010, Mischel & Ayduk 2002)
and overlaps substantially with inhibitory control (see Figure 4). EF researchers have
historically focused more on thoughts, attention, and actions [and hence more on lateral
prefrontal cortex (dorso- and ventrolateral prefrontal)]; self-regulation researchers have
focused more on emotions [and hence more on medial prefrontal cortex (especially
orbitofrontal) and on the parasympathetic nervous system]. EF researchers have addressed
emotions primarily as problems to be inhibited; self-regulation researchers also embrace the
importance of motivation and interest as helpful emotional responses for achieving one’s
goals (Blair & Diamond 2008). Historically, self-regulation has been assessed through (a)
adult ratings of children’s behavior observed in real-world settings such as home or school,
and (b) observation of children’s behavior when they have to delay gratification in an
emotionally laden “hot” situation (Mischel et al. 1989) or in a frustrating situation
(Kochanska et al. 2009). Historically, EFs have been assessed directly from children’s
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behavior, but on arbitrary laboratory-based tests far removed from the real world in fairly
emotionally neutral “cool” situations.

Effortful control (Rothbart & Bates 2006) refers to an aspect of temperament. It is an innate
predisposition to exercise self-regulation with ease (e.g., easily able to slow down or lower
one’s voice), perhaps even being too regulated (lacking in spontaneity) versus finding self-
regulation difficult or less natural. It is usually assessed by parental report (Goldsmith 1996,
Rothbart et al. 2001).

Executive attention (Posner & DiGirolamo 1998) refers to the top-down regulation of
attention. It is usually assessed using measures of selective attention such as the Flanker task
(Fan et al. 2002, Rueda et al. 2005). Much confusion has been engendered by the overly
broad use of the term executive attention to apply to such skills as WM capacity (Engle
2002) and response inhibition or the resolution of response conflict (as in a Simon-type task;
Jones et al. 2003).
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IT IS NOT ALWAYS BENEFICIAL TO EXERT EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS OR

TOP-DOWN CONTROL
We need lateral prefrontal cortex (EFs) when learning something new. When something is
new, those who recruit lateral prefrontal cortex most often perform best (Duncan & Owen
2000, Poldrack et al. 2005). However, after something is no longer new, those who perform
best often recruit lateral prefrontal cortex least (Chein & Schneider 2005, Garavan et al.
2000, Landau et al. 2007, Milham et al. 2003). When you are really good at something, you
are using top-down control very little if at all (as in Zen in the Art of Archery; Herrigel
1999). Indeed, when you are truly good at something, thinking about what you are doing
often gets in the way of performing well. Thus, early in training, disrupting lateral prefrontal

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cortex function impairs task performance, but disrupting lateral prefrontal function after a
task is familiar can improve performance (Miller et al. 2003).
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Phylogenetically older brain regions have had far longer to perfect their functioning; they
can subserve task performance ever so much more efficiently than can prefrontal cortex.
You might say that your goal in trying to master something is to have it become so well
learned that prefrontal cortex and EFs are no longer needed for it. Instead, performance is
handed off to older regions that have had thousands of more years of evolutionary time to
perfect their functioning and can subserve task performance ever so much more efficiently
than can prefrontal. A child may know intellectually (at the level of prefrontal cortex) that
s/he should not hit another, but in the heat of the moment if that knowledge has not become
automatic (passed on from prefrontal to subcortical regions), the child will hit another
(though if asked, s/he knows not to do that). It’s the difference between knowing what you
should do at an intellectual level and having it become second nature. The way something
becomes second nature or automatic is through repeated practice. This is consistent with
what Ericsson has repeatedly found to be key for being truly excellent at anything (e.g.,
Ericsson et al. 2009), i.e., hours and hours of practice.
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CANARY IN THE COAL MINE: EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS AS AN EARLY

WARNING SYSTEM
EFs and prefrontal cortex are the first to suffer, and suffer disproportionately, if something is
not right in your life. They suffer first, and most, if you are stressed (Arnsten 1998, Liston et
al. 2009, Oaten & Cheng 2005), sad (Hirt et al. 2008, von Hecker & Meiser 2005), lonely
(Baumeister et al. 2002, Cacioppo & Patrick 2008, Campbell et al. 2006, Tun et al. 2012),
sleep deprived (Barnes et al. 2012, Huang et al. 2007), or not physically fit (Best 2010,
Chaddock et al. 2011, Hillman et al. 2008). Any of these can cause you to appear to have a
disorder of EFs, such as ADHD, when you do not. You can see the deleterious effects of
stress, sadness, loneliness, and lack of physical health or fitness at the physiological and
neuroanatomical level in prefrontal cortex and at the behavioral level in worse EFs (poorer
reasoning and problem solving, forgetting things, and impaired ability to exercise discipline
and self-control).

If we want schoolchildren, workers, or business executives to have better attention and

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concentration, be better able to reason and problem solve, we cannot ignore stresses in their
lives. Each schoolchild and each employee will do better if that individual’s passionate
interests can be engaged, energizing the person. They will perform better and show better
EFs if they feel they are in a supportive community they can count on. They will perform
better and show better EFs if their bodies are strong and healthy. A school or corporation
that ignores students’ or employees’ emotional, social, or physical needs is likely to find that
those unmet needs will work against achieving performance goals.

TRAINING AND PRACTICE IMPROVE EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS

EFs can be improved (Diamond & Lee 2011, Klingberg 2010). The strongest evidence for
an activity improving children’s EFs exists for CogMed© computerized training (Bergman

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 Diamond Page 20

Nutley et al. 2011, Holmes et al. 2009, Klingberg et al. 2005, Thorell et al. 2009), a
combination of computerized and interactive games (Mackey et al. 2011), task-switching
computerized training (Karbach & Kray 2009), Taekwondo traditional martial arts (Lakes &
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Hoyt 2004), and two add-ons to school curricula, Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies
(PATHS; Riggs et al. 2006) and the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP; Raver et al.
2008, 2011). The above-referenced studies used random assignment and included an active
control group and pre- and post-intervention measures; they found convincing transfer to
more than one objective measure of EFs on which the children had not been trained. Studies
that have thus far looked at the benefits to children’s EFs from aerobics (Davis et al. 2011,
Kamijo et al. 2011), mindfulness (Flook et al. 2010), yoga (Manjunath & Telles 2001),
Tools of the Mind early childhood curriculum (Diamond et al. 2007), and Montessori
curriculum (Lillard & Else-Quest 2006) have found positive results but lacked one or more
of the above design features. With adults, the focus has most often been on computerized
training, especially of WM. Recent reviews of such computerized EF training with adults are
cautiously optimistic but note important design flaws (Morrison & Chein 2011, Shipstead et
al. 2012).

A few principles hold regardless of the EF program or intervention:

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1. The children most behind on EFs (including disadvantaged children) benefit the
most from any EF intervention or program (Flook et al. 2010, Karbach & Kray
2009, Lakes & Hoyt 2004). Hence, early EF training might level the playing field
by reducing social disparities in EFs, thus heading off social disparities in academic
achievement and health (O’Shaughnessy et al. 2003).

2. EF training appears to transfer, but transfer from computerized WM or reasoning

training has been narrow (e.g., computer training on spatial WM transfers to other
measures of spatial WM but not to visual WM or other EF subcomponents;
Bergman Nutley et al. 2011). EF gains from training in task switching (Karbach &
Kray 2009), traditional martial arts (Lakes & Hoyt 2004) and school curricula
(Raver et al. 2011, Riggs et al. 2006) have been wider, perhaps because the
programs address EFs more globally. For example, training task switching (which
arguably requires all three core EFs) transferred not only to an untrained task-
switching task, but also to inhibition (Stroop interference), verbal and nonverbal
WM, and reasoning (Karbach & Kray 2009).
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3. EF demands need to be continually incrementally increased or few gains are seen

(Bergman Nutley et al. 2011, Holmes et al. 2009, Klingberg et al. 2005). There
may be two reasons for that. (a) If difficulty doesn’t increase, the activity becomes
boring and people lose interest. (Which raises a general question about the
appropriateness of a control group where difficulty does not increase, if that means
the groups also differ in their sustained interest.) (b) You need to keep pushing
yourself to do better or you stop improving. Similarly, Ericsson et al. (2009)
emphasize that the practice that leads to expertise at anything consists of trying to
master what is just beyond your current level of competence and comfort.

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4. Repeated practice is key. Whether EF gains are seen depends on the amount of time
spent doggedly working on those skills, pushing oneself to improve (Klingberg et
al. 2005). School curricula shown to improve EFs train and challenge EFs
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throughout the day, embedding that in all activities, not only in a module (which
may also have the benefit of varying the content and kind of EF practice; Diamond
et al. 2007, Lillard & Else-Quest 2006, Riggs et al. 2006).

5. The largest differences between intervention groups and controls are consistently
found on the most demanding EF tasks and task conditions. It is often only in
pushing the limits of children’s EF skills that group differences emerge (Davis et
al. 2011, Diamond et al. 2007, Manjunath & Telles 2001). For example, in their
first year of data collection, Farran & Wilson (2011) found no EF benefits from
Tools of the Mind, but their assessment tasks were plagued by ceiling and floor
effects.

At any age across the life cycle EFs can be improved, including in the elderly and in infants.
There has been much work with excellent results on improving EFs in the elderly by
improving physical fitness (Erickson & Kramer 2009, Voss et al. 2011). Increasingly,
research is also showing promising results from computerized EF training with older adults
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(Lövdén et al. 2010, Richmond et al. 2011). Much but not all of the work on improving EFs
in young adults has focused on computerized training (Morrison & Chein 2011, Muraven
2010, Shipstead et al. 2012). Exposure to bilingual input has been one of the foci, though not
the only focus, of work on accelerating the development of EFs in infants (Kovács & Mehler
2009, Wass et al. 2011). [Bilingualism appears to accelerate EF development during
childhood and preserve EFs longer during aging (e.g., Bialystok & Viswanathan 2009), but
its chief benefit appears to be in improving speed of processing. For example, bilingual
older adults do not show a smaller Simon effect (i.e., do not show better inhibitory control
on the task) but rather are faster on all trials (Bialystok et al. 2004).]

No one has yet looked at what distinguishes those who benefit from EF training from those
who don’t, other than the amount of practice and baseline EFs. We know little about
whether benefits last or how long they might last, or about what dose or frequency is best.
What factors affect how long benefits last? Are refresher or booster sessions needed, and if
so at what intervals and for how long? Are different programs more beneficial at different
ages? Who might benefit most from which activity? Does the optimal dose or frequency
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vary by age? These questions are particularly pressing because “interventions that achieve
even small improvements in [inhibitory control] for individuals could shift the entire
distribution of outcomes in a salutary direction and yield large improvements in health,
wealth, and crime rate for a nation” (Moffitt et al. 2011, p. 2694).

In conclusion, EFs are critical for many of the skills that most people would agree will be
important for success in the twenty-first century—such as creativity, flexibility, self-control,
and discipline. EFs make it possible for us to mentally play with ideas, quickly and flexibly
adapt to changed circumstances, take time to consider what to do next, resist temptations,
stay focused, and meet novel, unanticipated challenges.

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 Diamond Page 22

We share with even simple organisms the ability to be conditioned (to be affected by our
experience), and we, like them, come into the world with certain biological predispositions.
However, we are able to hold in mind things we cannot see and to inhibit our predispositions
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and conditioned responses, however fragile and incomplete those abilities may be. We have
the possibility to exercise choice and control over what we do. Now is an exciting time
because we have the tools to answer many of the unresolved questions about EFs. Finding
the answers to these questions is critical because the ability of our generation and
succeeding ones to meet the world’s challenges may depend on that.

Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Silvia Bunge, Patti Reuter-Lorenz, Yuko Munakata, and Daphne Ling for
extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. I would also like to express my gratitude for
financial support from NIDA R01 #DA019685 during the writing of this article.

Glossary

Executive a collection of top-down control processes used when going on

functions (EFs) automatic or relying on instinct or intuition would be ill-advised,
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insufficient, or impossible
Inhibition controlling one’s attention, behavior, thoughts, and/or emotions to
(inhibitory override a strong internal predisposition or external lure
control)
Self-control the aspect of inhibitory control that involves resisting temptations
and not acting impulsively or prematurely
Working holding information in mind and mentally working with it (e.g.,
memory (WM) relating one thing to another, using information to solve a problem)
Cognitive changing perspectives or approaches to a problem, flexibly adjusting
flexibility to new demands, rules, or priorities (as in switching between tasks)
CANTAB Cambridge Neuropsychological Testing Automated Battery
PATHS Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies
CSRP Chicago School Readiness Project
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SUMMARY POINTS
1. EFs and prefrontal cortex are the first to suffer and suffer disproportionately if
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you are stressed, sad, lonely, or not physically fit. Because EFs are critical for
academic achievement, a society that wants its students to excel needs to take
seriously that the different parts of the human being are fundamentally
interrelated. If emotional, social, or physical needs are ignored, those unmet
needs will work against good EFs and hence against academic excellence. A
person may be incorrectly diagnosed with an EF disorder when what is really
wrong is that stress, sadness, loneliness, lack of sleep, or lack of physical
exercise in that person’s life are impairing his ability to display the EFs of which
he is capable.

2. It’s extremely important to help young children have good executive functioning
because EFs early in life have been found to predict lifelong achievement,
health, wealth, and quality of life.

3. EFs are trainable and can be improved at any age—probably by many different
approaches.
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4. Repeated practice is key; exercising and challenging executive functions

improves them and thus is beneficial for our mental health, much as physical
exercise improves our physical fitness and is beneficial for our bodily health.

5. It is not always beneficial to exert EFs; sometimes thinking about what you are
doing and trying to exercise top-down control gets in the way of optimal
performance.

6. What is commonly called “fluid intelligence” is the reasoning and problem-

solving component of EFs; like other EFs, it can be improved through training
and practice.

7. Not all tasks measure what their name implies (e.g., “working memory span”
tasks often measure EFs more generally and not just WM). Two widely used
measures of response inhibition—the go/no-go and stop-signal tasks—differ
from many real-world instances of inhibitory control and appear to be unusual
cases of when inhibitory control is needed rather than paradigmatic examples.
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8. Although “interference control” (selective attention and cognitive inhibition) is

usually grouped under inhibitory control, it may more properly belong with
WM. Focusing on information held in working memory might as easily be
called keeping your attention focused on those mental contents. Empirically,
selective attention and WM could hardly be more tightly linked. Cognitive
inhibition is inhibition in the service of protecting WM’s mental workspace
(keeping irrelevant information out and deleting no-longer-relevant information
from WM). It coheres more strongly with working memory measures than with
measures of other aspects of inhibition.

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FUTURE ISSUES
1. What can parents do to aid the development of EFs in their children?
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2. For programs and interventions that appear to improve EFs—which are best;
what are the best doses, durations, and frequency; how long do benefits last; and
does this differ by age, gender, cultural group, or type of program?

3. Given that EF training disproportionately benefits those with poorer EFs and
disadvantaged children have poorer EFs, might early EF training reduce social
disparities in achievement and health by reducing the EF gap before school
entry?

4. Which activities not yet studied might improve EFs? Excellent candidates
include the arts (such as theater, orchestra, dance, choir, and filmmaking), caring
for an animal, service activities to improve the local or global community, and
athletic activities (such as rock climbing, basketball, soccer, capoeira, and
rowing crew). Will the type of program end up mattering more, or will the way
it is done be more significant?
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5. There are so many diverse forms of inhibitory control. What are the
commonalities and differences among them? And how do they relate to working
memory—can working memory account for all, some, or none of them?

6. Much more in-depth and detailed study is needed of the roles of subcortical
regions in EFs.

7. What roles do neurotransmitters other than dopamine and norepinephrine, and

interactions among neurotransmitters, play in EFs?

8. Given that sex hormones affect neurotransmitter levels, what sex differences
might be found, and how might those impact proper dosages of medications that
affect EFs?
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Figure 1.
Passive-dissipation model showing how delay can improve performance on inhibitory tasks
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(from Simpson et al. 2011).

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Figure 2.
At every age studied, children were slower and less accurate on the congruent block than on
the incongruent block. That effect is completely absent in adults, who are as fast and as
accurate on the incongruent block as on the congruent one. The memory demands of those
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two blocks were the same; they differ only in that the incongruent block requires inhibitory
control and the congruent block does not (based on Davidson et al. 2006; this is now called
Hearts and Flowers.).
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Figure 3.
Comparison of the mixed conditions of the Dots (now called Hearts and Flowers) and Simon
tasks in percentage of correct responses (based on Davidson et al. 2006).
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Figure 4.
Executive functions and related terms.
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Table 1

Executive functions (EFs) are important to just about every aspect of life
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Aspects of life The ways in which EFs are relevant to that aspect of life References
Mental health EFs are impaired in many mental disorders, including:

- Addictions Baler & Volkow 2006

- Attention deficit hyperactivity (ADHD) Diamond 2005, Lui & Tannock 2007

- Conduct disorder Fairchild et al. 2009

- Depression Taylor-Tavares et al. 2007

- Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) Penadés et al. 2007

- Schizophrenia Barch 2005

Physical health Poorer EFs are associated with obesity, overeating, substance Crescioni et al. 2011, Miller et al. 2011,
abuse, and poor treatment adherence Riggs et al. 2010

Quality of life People with better EFs enjoy a better quality of life Brown & Landgraf 2010, Davis et al. 2010

School readiness EFs are more important for school readiness than are IQ or Blair & Razza 2007, Morrison et al. 2010
entry-level reading or math

School success EFs predict both math and reading competence throughout the Borella et al. 2010, Duncan et al. 2007,
school years Gathercole et al. 2004
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Job success Poor EFs lead to poor productivity and difficulty finding and Bailey 2007
keeping a job

Marital harmony A partner with poor EFs can be more difficult to get along with, Eakin et al. 2004
less dependable, and/or more likely to act on impulse

Public safety Poor EFs lead to social problems (including crime, reckless Broidy et al. 2003, Denson et al. 2011
behavior, violence, and emotional outbursts)
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