Assessing executive functions: A life‐span perspective

Abstract

Despite many disagreements on the utility of neuropsychological applications in schools, executive function measures have been found to be useful across a variety of areas and ages. In addition, many disagreements are extant in discussions of the maturational course of the development of executive functioning abilities that are dependent on functional capacity of the human brain, including the frontal lobes, among other brain areas. In part, these controversies are related to a dearth of standardized functional assessments of executive functioning abilities across wide age spans. This article describes several recent measures of executive functioning and uses life-span data from these assessments to project maturational periods of specific executive functions. Clinical implications of these results for school psychology assessment, rehabilitation of brain-injured school-aged children, and forensic practice of school psychology are posited. C 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.During the last half century, interest in the applications of human brain-behavior relationships has increased at a tremendous rate. There are many examples of the validity of neuropsychological research findings as well as successful applications of neuropsychological assessment intervention methods with children (Hartlage, 1975(Hartlage, , 1986Horton, 1994;Horton & Puente, 1986;Hynd & Willis, 1988;Reitan & Davison, 1974;Reynolds & Fletcher-Janzen, 1997). These remarkable demonstrations of the power of neuropsychological methods have engendered great interest in clinical neuropsychology and school psychology. The value of assessing neuropsychological variables has been clearly demonstrated through the work of famous neuropsychologists such as Ralph M. Reitan, Arthur L. Benton, and A. R. Luria, among others over a number of decades. Although contemporary neurodiagnostic imaging methods such as positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or functional MRI (fMRI) can clearly identify structural brain lesions (Roth, Koven, & Pendergrass, in press), in subtle cases neuroimaging is often inadequate to reflect changes in the physiological functioning of the brain that may result in behavioral abnormalities. Although they can predict generally the form of neuropsychological malfunction that is most likely, imaging studies also cannot accurately assess the functional extent of any changes. Neuropathological conditions (such as sequelae of traumatic brain injury and neurotoxic conditions) may produce clear neurocognitive, sensory-perceptual, and motor deficits without demonstrating clear structural brain changes under imaging (Horton & Horton, in press).The purpose of this article is to address the importance of assessing executive function (EF) in children, describe some newly developed methods for assessing EFs in children (Reynolds & Horton, 2006), and address the developmental period of the frontal lobe and other brain areas that subserve EFs throughout the human life span. First, the article will discuss the developme...

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