Unity and Diversity of Executive Functions: Individual Differences as a Window on Cognitive Structure

By Naomi P. Friedman, Akira Miyake. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 2016

1,534 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Executive functions (EFs) are high-level cognitive processes, often associated with the frontal lobes, that control lower level processes in the service of goal-directed behavior. They include abilities such as response inhibition, interference control, working memory updating, and set shifting. EFs show a general pattern of shared but distinct functions, a pattern described as “unity and diversity.” We review studies of EF unity and diversity at the behavioral and genetic levels, focusing on studies of normal individual differences and what they reveal about the functional organization of these cognitive abilities. In particular, we review evidence that across multiple ages and populations, commonly studied EFs (a) are robustly correlated but separable when measured with latent variables; (b) are not the same as general intelligence or g; (c) are highly heritable at the latent level and seemingly also highly polygenic; and (d) activate both common and specific neural areas and can be linked to individual differences in neural activation, volume, and connectivity. We highlight how considering individual differences at the behavioral and neural levels can add considerable insight to the investigation of the functional organization of the brain, and conclude with some key points about individual differences to consider when interpreting neuropsychological patterns of dissociation.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/520e13d3a708e65b5e1c5f1e0e3e5327f892feca

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Annual Research Review: On the relations among self-regulation, self-control, executive functioning, effortful control, cognitive control, impulsivity, risk-taking, and inhibition for developmental psychopathology (2016, neutral): “…(a) a set of at leastpartially independent top-down functions that support goal-directed action (Banich, 2009; Blair et al., 2016; Diamond, 2013; Friedman & Miyake, 2016; Miyake et al., 2000); or in a computational context, rule-governed behavior (guided by internal goals or rules rather than…”
The role of prefrontal cortex in cognitive control and executive function (2021, background): “To the extent that keeping goals highly active and proactively biasing ongoing processing influences stopping, performance may be more determined by these global processes rather than inhibitionspecific ones [29, 97, 169].”
Attention Control: A Cornerstone of Higher-Order Cognition (2020, background): “It is also referred to as cognitive control (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001), executive control (Baddeley, 1996), and executive attention (Engle, 2002), and it shares many similarities with the executive-functions framework of Friedman and Miyake (2017).”