Richland Lindsey Engle, Zhao Hongyang
School of Education, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2023 Sep 27;14:1219414. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219414. eCollection 2023.
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) socialization norms, 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.
对日常思维组成要素的测量必须涵盖人类在现实世界任务中训练、发展和运用认知资源的各种不同方式。执行功能作为一个概念，因其被理论化为人类在现实世界中完成复杂认知要求任务（如识别问题、推理并执行多步骤解决方案，同时抑制优势反应或竞争欲望）的基础和制约因素，而被认知科学和教育科学积极采用。随着执行功能测量方法不断完善以提高精度；然而，它们也越来越脱离那些日常成就。我们提出这一见解的三个影响：（1）现有的减少情境的执行功能测量方法实际上增加了一个隐含要求，即儿童使用在现实世界中不起作用的抽象规则进行推理，这意味着执行功能分数可能部分反映了接受正规学校教育的经历以及西方、受过教育、工业化、富裕、民主（WEIRD）的社会化规范，限制了它们预测跨情境日常生活成功的能力，（2）在这种背景下，关系性注意力和关系性推理的测量尚未得到充分考虑，但与测量执行功能的关键目标高度一致，并且可能更符合人类的日常认知实践，但是（3）为了测量的清晰度，关系性注意力和推理应该与执行功能一起考虑，而不是像有人建议的那样作为执行功能的一个额外方面。
