Executive function: notions of development from a neuropsychological perspective

Abstract

From a development perspective we can see how the children will be better able to control every self their own actions, responses and regulate their own behavior (self-regulation of behavior) or as a heteronymous moral pass to an autonomous morality. This capacity for self-regulation of behavior is linked to the development of other cognitive processes (working memory, planning, inhibition of automatic responses ...), all of them related to the same construct, executive functioning. In this paper we will discuss briefly how this construct has been conceptualized, focusing on one of the paradoxes that has dominated the literature in the last decade, which considers executive functioning as a unit while integrating a variety of independent functions, more specifically, the general lines of the hierarchical model proposed by Miyake and colleagues who identified three independent dimensions are integrated in executive functioning: attention flexibility, inhibitory control and working memory; consistent with this model, we analyze neurological substrate on which they are based; Finally, we compare different theories of the development of executive functioning with the hierarchical model proposed by Miyake and colleagues.