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Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning

Measurement of the building blocks of everyday thought must capture the range of different ways that humans may train, develop, and use their cognitive resources in real world tasks. Executive function as a construct has been enthusiastically adopted by cognitive and education sciences due to its th...

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Autores principales: Richland, Lindsey Engle, Zhao, Hongyang
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10565812/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37829078
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219414
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author Richland, Lindsey Engle
Zhao, Hongyang
author_facet Richland, Lindsey Engle
Zhao, Hongyang
author_sort Richland, Lindsey Engle
collection PubMed
description Measurement of the building blocks of everyday thought must capture the range of different ways that humans may train, develop, and use their cognitive resources in real world tasks. Executive function as a construct has been enthusiastically adopted by cognitive and education sciences due to its theorized role as an underpinning of, and constraint on, humans’ accomplishment of complex cognitively demanding tasks in the world, such as identifying problems, reasoning about and executing multi-step solutions while inhibiting prepotent responses or competing desires. As EF measures have been continually refined for increased precision; however, they have also become increasingly dissociated from those everyday accomplishments. We posit three implications of this insight: (1) extant measures of EFs that reduce context actually add an implicit requirement that children reason using abstract rules that are not accomplishing a function in the world, meaning that EF scores may in part reflect experience with formal schooling and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) socialization norms, limiting their ability to predict success in everyday life across contexts, (2) measurement of relational attention and relational reasoning have not received adequate consideration in this context but are highly aligned with the key aims for measuring EFs, and may be more aligned with humans’ everyday cognitive practices, but (3) relational attention and reasoning should be considered alongside rather than as an additional EF as has been suggested, for measurement clarity.
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spelling pubmed-105658122023-10-12 Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning Richland, Lindsey Engle Zhao, Hongyang Front Psychol Psychology Measurement of the building blocks of everyday thought must capture the range of different ways that humans may train, develop, and use their cognitive resources in real world tasks. Executive function as a construct has been enthusiastically adopted by cognitive and education sciences due to its theorized role as an underpinning of, and constraint on, humans’ accomplishment of complex cognitively demanding tasks in the world, such as identifying problems, reasoning about and executing multi-step solutions while inhibiting prepotent responses or competing desires. As EF measures have been continually refined for increased precision; however, they have also become increasingly dissociated from those everyday accomplishments. We posit three implications of this insight: (1) extant measures of EFs that reduce context actually add an implicit requirement that children reason using abstract rules that are not accomplishing a function in the world, meaning that EF scores may in part reflect experience with formal schooling and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) socialization norms, limiting their ability to predict success in everyday life across contexts, (2) measurement of relational attention and relational reasoning have not received adequate consideration in this context but are highly aligned with the key aims for measuring EFs, and may be more aligned with humans’ everyday cognitive practices, but (3) relational attention and reasoning should be considered alongside rather than as an additional EF as has been suggested, for measurement clarity. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-09-27 /pmc/articles/PMC10565812/ /pubmed/37829078 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219414 Text en Copyright © 2023 Richland and Zhao. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Richland, Lindsey Engle
Zhao, Hongyang
Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning
title Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning
title_full Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning
title_fullStr Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning
title_full_unstemmed Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning
title_short Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning
title_sort measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10565812/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37829078
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219414
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