Adolescents’ daily executive function: Methodological considerations, daily variation, and associations with daily experiences.

Abstract

Research has rarely considered within-person variability in executive function. Using a web-based program, this study investigated end-of-day executive function for 2 weeks among 178 racially/ethnically diverse adolescents (M age = 14.53). For each core component of executive function (cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, working memory), short-term practice effects were identified for the first 4 days of assessments, and no fatigue effects emerged for the remaining days. Another 5 days were needed to achieve good reliability for assessing executive function at the between-person level. Considerable daily variation was identified for each component and the overall construct of executive function, with between 40% and 55% of the variation attributed to within-person variability. These daily variations were associated with adolescents' affective and academic experiences during the day. Public Significance StatementThis study identified significant daily variation in adolescents' executive function, which was influenced by their affective and academic experiences during the day. The current findings highlight important ways to improve adolescents' executive function in everyday life.

Daily associations between adolescents’ executive function and school engagement: The role of ethnic/racial discrimination.

“…For each participant, we excluded first 3 days of data wherein short-term practice effects were observed; no clear evidence of fatigue effects was identified (Y. Wang et al, 2021). We also coded EF data that had outlying response times (see descriptives in Table S1 in the online supplemental materials) as missing based on 2.5 Median Absolute Deviation from the sample median (Leys et al, 2013); this was done for 55 (5.2%) days of inhibitory control data from 24 participants, 150 (14.2%) days of working memory data from 80 participants, and 126 (12.0%) days of cognitive flexibility data from 64 participants.…”

“…This previous work addressed issues of practice and fatigue effects (see the Participants section), within-person and betweenperson reliability, criterion validity, and daily variability (Y. Wang et al, 2021).…”

“…As part of this ongoing effort to unpack within-person variability in cognitive functioning, our team developed a web-based program to assess daily EF over 2 weeks in an ethnically/racially diverse sample of adolescents (Y. Wang et al, 2021).…”

“…Our previous work has validated this method to assess daily fluctuations in EF, showing that, after partialing out trial-to-trial variance (including measurement errors), between 40% and 55% of the variance in EF can be attributed to within-person variability as opposed to between-person differences. Moreover, adolescents’ daily mood and school belonging contributed to the same-day, within-person fluctuations of two EF components, inhibitory control and working memory (Y. Wang et al, 2021).…”

Executive Functioning Constructs in Anxiety, Obsessive–Compulsive, Post-Traumatic Stress, and Related Disorders

“…Causality operates at the between-person and within-person level: Patterns that apply across persons in the population (i.e., between-person) do not necessarily contribute to anxiety-related symptoms and EF in a unique person; changes that include that particular person do (i.e., shifts at the within-person level) [ 95 ]. Such efforts require developing neurocognitive tests with strong reliability at between- and within-person levels and good construct validity with scores on other ambulatory EF assessments [ 96 ]. They also call for using advanced statistics discussed throughout this review.…”