Habilidades de la función ejecutiva

(En inglés)

Child Development: Brain Building: Video 3

Dr. Juliet Morrison: So let's start with what are executive function skills. Many of you might have heard this term, "executive function," before. And actually, it might be defined a little bit differently, in different audiences.

So today I wanted to talk about it in specific language that's around three specific elements that come together. And the first is inhibitory control. You might also hear of this called effortful control. Inhibitory control is the skill that we use to master and filter our thoughts and impulses so we can resist temptations, distractions, and habits, and really to pause, and think before we act.

So you'll see a picture on the screen of a child who's sitting in front of a marshmallow, and this is about a - a famous study where children were asked to sit before a marshmallow, and somebody would say to them, "You can have one marshmallow now, or you can wait, I'm going to leave the room, and when I come back after a period of time, you can have two marshmallows if you don't grab that one right away." And children were given sort of a bell, and they could ring if they just couldn't wait anymore. And what this really was testing is this notion of inhibitory control. It can be defined as the ability to resist a strong inclination to do one thing, like take that one marshmallow. Instead, think about what you might want to do that's more appropriate. So what's that end goal? And as you know, children are working on this every day. And adults also work on this.

The second element of executive function is called working memory. Working memory is the capacity to hold and manipulate information in our heads over short periods of time, and it's another element of executive function. So when you think about it, it's not just about remembering information. It's about holding that information in mind, and then working with it. So although you can't repeat after me, I'll ask you to just kind of think in your head. I'm going to say a series of numbers, and just think about repeating those in your mind right after me. So one, seven, nine, four. Those are the numbers. So that's memory, remembering what that string of numbers is. But now I want you to think about repeating those same numbers in your mind, but ordering them from smallest to greatest. So in your mind, you would think, "one, four, seven, nine." And that is working memory. It's taking information and manipulating it in your mind, and then using it. And of course, children need to remember many steps and rules involved in their world, and that often requires remembering and using information in new situations. So you see here a picture of a child who's working on a long division problem. So remembering all the steps that go into a particular area of learning.

And then the third element of executive function is called mental or cognitive flexibility. And this is the capacity to nimbly switch gears, and adjust to changing demands, priorities, or perspectives. It's what we use to apply different rules in different settings, and then to catch mistakes and fix them. So, you know, adults again use this every day. If we're driving and, you know, we have a route that we go every day, and we come upon a "Road closed" sign on our normal route, we have to think really quickly about how we can find another way home. It's the skill that we call upon when we're playing a game, as you see here with this child who's playing a game of chess, and it looks like he was surprised by that move that his opponent made. So having to think of a new strategy on the fly, that's exactly what mental flexibility is, and it's a fairly advanced skill for young children, and develops later than both inhibitory control and working memory.

So executive function skills do not happen in isolation, though. So those are three basic elements, but what I want to kind of convey is that it is rare that we would call upon one executive function skill, and not also call upon other skills. And the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard has a nice metaphor of thinking about executive functioning as sort of the air traffic control system in the brain. That it really captures a set of skills that are increasingly understood as the biological foundation for successful learning and social relationships.

So if you think about air traffic controllers, they have to manage a variety of different planes that are coming in on different runways, and they have to have exquisite timing to the whole process. And that's really what executive functioning is. It's these group of skills that help us manage multiple streams of information at the same time, set goals, make good on those plans, make decisions in light of the information that we have at hand, and then revise those things if things don't work out exactly as we planned.

So if you think about it, these skills are also something that we need to call on every day. So here's an example that could happen every day. Think about a mother who's coming home, she needs to get dinner on the table, but the phone is ringing, and her kids are asking for help with their homework, and then the dogs are barking at the back door. And so what she needs to do is to quickly prioritize, and plan how she's going to deal with all of these multiple distractions happening at one time. So she remembers that she's going to check the phone messages when dinner is over. She lets the dog in, but she knows just where to pick up with the meal preparation despite the interruption. She asks her children to do what they can until she can get dinner in the oven. And so what you see is this involves that she has to focus, hold, and work with information in mind, filter distractions, and switch gears. So that really is like an air traffic control system in the brain, managing lots of things, and really working at just the right timing. And that's kind of like daily life. Executive function skills tend to be invisible when they're working really well. But when they're not working, of course, that's when things become very evident.

So for children, this might look a little different. Think of a situation where a child needs to take turns. This pulls really heavily on exactly these skills of executive function. First, the child has to have inhibitory control because she needs to be able to stop what she is doing, and let another child take a turn. And then she needs to inhibit the urge to keep going with her turn. So there's that inhibitory control. But when it is her turn again, she needs to remember what she was doing, she needs to remember the rules of the activity or game, and just where to pick up. And that pulls on working memory. And then if you think, "what if her partner does something unpredictable or unexpected?" She also needs to be able to adjust her plans to fit into the flow of this new development, and that requires mental flexibility.