The Nature and Organization of Individual Differences in Executive Functions: Four General Conclusions

By Akira Miyake, Naomi P. Friedman. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2012

3,627 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Executive functions (EFs)—a set of general-purpose control processes that regulate one’s thoughts and behaviors—have become a popular research topic lately and have been studied in many subdisciplines of psychological science. This article summarizes the EF research that our group has conducted to understand the nature of individual differences in EFs and their cognitive and biological underpinnings. In the context of a new theoretical framework that we have been developing (the unity/diversity framework), we describe four general conclusions that have emerged. Specifically, we argue that individual differences in EFs, as measured with simple laboratory tasks, (a) show both unity and diversity (different EFs are correlated yet separable), (b) reflect substantial genetic contributions, (c) are related to various clinically and societally important phenomena, and (d) show some developmental stability.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17acbb4d82326f24bbdc5841507680398ccca236

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Citations in the corpus

The differentiation of executive functions in middle and late childhood: A longitudinal latent-variable analysis (2014, background): “This model proposes that there is a general, domain-free ability underlying all executive processes, as well as several independent abilities specific to each single executive function (Miyake & Friedman, 2012).”
No compelling evidence for a bilingual advantage in switching or that frequent language switching reduces switch cost (2017, methodology): “This analysis led Miyake and Friedman (2012) to conclude that EF has both unity (a common EF) and diversity (additional specific abilities associated with switching and updating).”
Executive functions and the generation of “random” sequential responses: A computational account (2016, background): “There is mounting evidence to question whether response inhibition is in fact a distinct executive function (e.g., Hampshire & Sharp, 2015; Miyake & Friedman, 2012), and the current model does not include a specific response inhibition function (though inhibition of putative responses does occur…”
Bilingualism and cognition (2014, methodology): “Updating might be glossed as “effective gating of information” or “controlled retrieval from long term memory” (Miyake & Friedman, 2012); or as working memory (Hoffman, Schmeichel & Baddeley, 2012); or as a form of executive attention, “the ability to control attention to maintain information in an…”
The Bilingual Adaptation: How Minds Accommodate Experience (2017, background): “More importantly, recent work on this model has eliminated inhibition entirely as a source of unique variance (Miyake & Friedman, 2012).”
The role of cognitive rigidity in political ideologies: theory, evidence, and future directions (2020, background): “It has been illustrated that individuals differ in their cognitive rigidity [14,15], and so it is possible to quantify the extent to which individuals tend to persist with previously established rules, mental heuristics, or behavioural patterns using neuropsychological tasks [16].”
Moving toward a neuroplasticity view of bilingualism, executive control, and aging (2014, background): “…is somewhat different from other executive control frameworks, which distinguish between a common executive control capacity (i.e., the unity of executive function), and distinct subsystems of switching and context updating (i.e., the diversity of executive function; Miyake & Friedman, 2012).”
Reported self-control is not meaningfully associated with inhibition-related executive function: A Bayesian analysis (2018, background): “Furthermore, while some analyses have suggested that a common latent factor unites measures of inhibitory executive functioning (Miyake et al., 2000; Miyake & Friedman, 2012), other research indicates a lack of convergence between these measures (Egner, 2008).”
Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction (2011, methodology): “Under this influence, scholars have applied three models to explain and guide learning in the psychomotor domain: information processing, expertise-novice comparison, and dynamical systems.”
Toward a Science of Effective Cognitive Training (2020, background): “This is a challenging endeavor for many reasons, among them the task-impurity problem in the measurement of EFs (Kane & Engle, 2003; Miyake & Friedman, 2012).”
The role of componential analysis, categorical hypothesising, replicability and confirmation bias in testing for bilingual advantages in executive functioning (2014, background): “” K&B extend the categorical hypothesising argument into Miyake and Friedman’s (2012) unity and diversity model of EF.”