Sebastián J. Lipina
Unidad de Neurobiología Aplicada
Centro de Educación Médica e Investigaciones Clínicas “Norberto Quirno” (Cemic)
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Conicet, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
“While all children have these tools for regulating their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, their expression and use during development varies greatly due to the influence of multiple individual and contextual differences.”
“Knowledge about how executive functions change during development when children live in contexts of socioeconomic deprivation is an area of knowledge that must also be expanded through the implementation of appropriate longitudinal research designs (those that follow every child along time).”
Sebastián J. Lipina
Unidade de Neurobiologia Aplicada
Centro de Educação Médica e Pesquisas Clínicas “Norberto Quirno” (Cemic)
Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas Científicas e Técnicas (Conicet/ Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Participation of policymakers, stakeholders, teachers, and parents is critical to contribute to the self-regulatory development of their communities of children
PHOTO: ADOBESTOCK
Executive functions consist of different emotional and cognitive processes that participate in the regulation of emotions, thoughts and behaviors during activities that require achieving goals, such as everyday life and school learning. Some examples of these functions include attention, inhibitory control of thought and behavior, management of recently acquired information, flexibility to change strategies when solving a task, and generating steps to solve a complex problem.
These regulatory processes begin to emerge during the first year of life and their development continues until at least the third decade of life. From preschool and throughout primary education, psychological research has found that the level of executive performance is positively associated with academic performance.
Personal characteristics and experiences during development influence the ways in which these functions develop and are implemented. This means that while all children have these tools for regulating their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, their expression and use during development varies greatly due to the influence of multiple individual and contextual differences.
Researchers study children’s executive performance through three main methods: (a) The administration of laboratory or standardized tasks (such as those used for psychodiagnostics assessments). (b) Reports of behaviors requiring executive functions at home and school from caregivers and teachers. And (c) observations of such behaviors in these and other developmental contexts, such as group sports activities, visits to pediatricians or museums, playing in a park, or participating in a classroom activity. Most studies conducted in recent decades are based on the first and second types of methods, so it is still necessary to expand knowledge about how these skills are implemented in more ecological contexts.
Executive functions consist of different emotional and cognitive processes that participate in the regulation of emotions, thoughts and behaviors during activities that require achieving goals, such as everyday life and school learning. Some examples of these functions include attention, inhibitory control of thought and behavior, management of recently acquired information, flexibility to change strategies when solving a task, and generating steps to solve a complex problem.
These regulatory processes begin to emerge during the first year of life and their development continues until at least the third decade of life. From preschool and throughout primary education, psychological research has found that the level of executive performance is positively associated with academic performance.
“While all children have these tools for regulating their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, their expression and use during development varies greatly due to the influence of multiple individual and contextual differences.”
Personal characteristics and experiences during development influence the ways in which these functions develop and are implemented. This means that while all children have these tools for regulating their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, their expression and use during development varies greatly due to the influence of multiple individual and contextual differences.
Researchers study children’s executive performance through three main methods: (a) The administration of laboratory or standardized tasks (such as those used for psychodiagnostics assessments). (b) Reports of behaviors requiring executive functions at home and school from caregivers and teachers. And (c) observations of such behaviors in these and other developmental contexts, such as group sports activities, visits to pediatricians or museums, playing in a park, or participating in a classroom activity. Most studies conducted in recent decades are based on the first and second types of methods, so it is still necessary to expand knowledge about how these skills are implemented in more ecological contexts.
“Knowledge about how executive functions change during development when children live in contexts of socioeconomic deprivation is an area of knowledge that must also be expanded through the implementation of appropriate longitudinal research designs (those that follow every child along time).”
Socioeconomic deprivation
Studies conducted over the past three decades in different countries indicate that children from 0 to 18 years exposed to different forms of socioeconomic deprivation are more likely to obtain lower scores on tests and tasks that demand executive functions. Additionally, when analyzing the brain activity of some groups of children during this type of evaluation, researchers have also observed changes in electroencephalographic activity patterns that suggest changes in the maturation of some neural networks involved in executive functioning.
Most of these studies have implemented what are called synchronic designs—meaning that each child is evaluated only once instead of multiple times during their development. Authors mostly studied industrialized Western countries, focusing on deficits rather than other aspects such as adaptation possibilities. This latter feature has begun to be studied recently, and preliminary findings suggest that deprivations do not necessarily negate the possibility of implementing executive regulatory processes in all cases, but in many cases could result in forms of adaptation to contexts of deprivation. For example, attending to both relevant and irrelevant environmental stimuli to enhance their chances of adaptation. This is important because taking in consideration executive functions in educational plans and human development policies requires addressing the needs of different groups of children and consequently considering both deficit aspects and potentialities through adaptation to contexts of deprivation.
For the characterization of deprivation experiences, studies have mostly used individual indicators or combined information about family income, maternal education, and parental occupation. Evidence indicates that each of these indicators can be associated with specific executive processes in different ways, which would be related to the fact that each represents a source of resources and specific distribution dynamics at home. This is a research topic that requires more studies that explore with more emphasis the effect of different deprivation indicators that are more proximal to children’s experiences. For example, income or basic needs refer to family deprivations; but the lack of materials and incentives to foster age-appropriate learning at home directly relates to children’s deprivation. In the same sense, regarding the measures used to evaluate executive functions, it is still necessary to implement methods that consider specific individual and cultural aspects of children from different societies about how executive behaviors are expressed and valued in different cultures.
The associations between socioeconomic deprivations and executive functioning can also be mediated and moderated by different individual and contextual factors from the prenatal stage onward. The most frequently studied are the following: physiological dysregulation, individual physical and mental health, puberty onset time, exposure to stressors (e.g., harsh discipline, self-reported stress, parent stress, financial strain), parenting behavior (e.g., maternal warmth and sensitivity, maternal attentional scaffolding), home and school resources for cognitive stimulation, and language exposure. In addition, the scientific literature in this area is not yet conclusive on the potential influence of age, sex, ethnicity, and rural-urban distinctions in different societies.
While the accumulation of this knowledge is valid and provides guidance for parents, teachers, and policymakers, it also has some limitations that current research is trying to resolve to improve its understanding and use in designing intervention strategies and policies: (1) The information is probabilistic and based on average performance levels and deprivation experiences reported by families (not directly from children), which means it does not represent all children in their individual and contextual differences. (2) As it only represents the type of population from the samples used in the studies, its character is not universal, which raises the need to expand studies addressing the variability of developmental trajectories and systems of norms, beliefs, and values that each community has, or the imprints of high social inequality, such as those characterizing Latin American countries. (3) Knowledge about how executive functions change during development when children live in contexts of socioeconomic deprivation is an area of knowledge that must also be expanded through the implementation of appropriate longitudinal research designs (those that follow every child along time).
Construction and use of knowledge
Given the variability in executive development trajectories due to multiple individual and contextual factors, and the diversity of measurement instruments, future research would benefit from implementing longitudinal designs with a variety of assessment instruments and formats that value children’s performance, motivation, and interests, as well as samples from both minority countries (North America and Europe) and majority countries (the rest of the world), to more adequately explore: (a) The effect of the quantity and co-occurrence of deprivations on executive development. (b) At what points in their development are such associations strongest (timing). (c) How long the effects last (chronicity). (d) The specific role of deprivation experiences in children in different activities and developmental contexts (i.e., home, school, neighborhood). (e) The differentiation between deficit and adaptation effects. And (f) knowledge about intersectional dynamics among multiple factors of different levels of organization (i.e., neural, cognitive, behavioral, and social). The participation of policymakers, stakeholders, teachers, and parents in the construction and use of this knowledge is critical to contribute to the development of their communities of children.
