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ERIC Number: ED632145
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2023-Sep-27
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Measuring the Building Blocks of Everyday Cognition: Executive Functions and Relational Reasoning
Lindsey Engle Richland; Hongyang Zhao
Grantee Submission
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; Henrich et al 2010) socialization norms (Alcalá et al., 2018, Gaskins, 2000), 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. [This is the in press version of an article published in "Frontiers in Psychology."]
Publication Type: Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Institute of Education Sciences (ED); National Science Foundation (NSF)
Authoring Institution: N/A
IES Funded: Yes
Grant or Contract Numbers: R305A170488; R305A190467; 2141411
Author Affiliations: N/A