Colloquium: Maya Zuck Lecture in Child Development - "Changing Perspectives on Executive Function"

Executive functions develop dramatically during childhood and predict important life outcomes. According to dominant accounts, control over thoughts and actions is vital, and executive functions that support such control show stable individual differences: If you have high executive function capacity as a child, you will have high executive function capacity as an adult. However, recent research from my lab and others challenges this view. Children adaptively decide whether or not to engage executive functions based on a variety of factors beyond capacity. These decisions shape habits and influence the effort required for engaging executive functions in the future. Such findings support an alternative framework for understanding why people vary in their executive functioning, why these individual differences predict life outcomes, and how to identify targets for intervention.