Thread by @YukoMunakata1

1/ I've long wondered why executive function in childhood predicts life outcomes. Why does juggling information in mind, shifting between tasks, and controlling our impulses matter so much? I'm increasingly convinced that our early answers missed something fundamental.

2/ Early answers (including mine) focused on executive function CAPACITY: Some of us have a little, some of us have a lot. These individual differences stick with us and affect our ability to navigate school, relationships, work, health, and more.

3/ There may be something to that story. But many studies are revealing that kids (and adults) have executive function skills that they don’t engage on traditional assessments of executive function, for one reason or another.

4/ Imagine: Kids reacting like you're "from another planet" if you ask them to recite numbers backward. Kids prioritizing getting things right over finishing quickly. Kids refusing to say "day" to a picture of the moon, because that would be lying. wapo.st/3WZ9HRQ

@Carolynyjohnson dug into these findings after hearing @cogdevsoc talks by @danacotto, others, and me (featuring @makifactor et al.'s work). When Suzanne Gaskins came up after my talk, I feared she might say, "Duh." Her real reaction makes sense now.

https://x.com/Carolynyjohnson/status/1829156132537209320

6/ We've long known that test performance reflects all kinds of things, thanks to cultural, social, & dev psych, etc. But executive function seems different: at a higher level, w/measures designed to be less tied to knowledge/values, so performance predicts diverse life outcomes.

7/ Even Suzanne Gaskins, who has worked with a Yucatec Mayan community for decades, thought traditional executive function measures would work universally, as described in the WaPo story. But she and @DrAlcalaLucia found something more intriguing:
psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-45…

8/ For me, a moment of insight came from seeing that the same child can find delaying gratification easy or hard, depending on the rewards offered and how they relate to cultural practices.

https://x.com/YukoMunakata1/status/1542746291427352576

9/ The Global Executive Function Initiative is working to develop more culturally relevant approaches to assessment and support. I'm thrilled to have joined this thoughtful, innovative, collaborative group.
gefi.stanford.edu

10/ These discussions highlight the need to rethink *why* children's behaviors predict life outcomes, not *whether* they do. I think there's good evidence THAT they do. For example: osf.io/preprints/psya…

11/ The controversies' reflect (in part) how you interpret what happens to the links after you add in covariates spanning cognitive and behavioral skills, family environment, and more, as @lamichaelson @sabinedoebel and I discuss.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

12/ Some researchers advocate controlling for many variables in an attempt to “purify” measures of executive function, and dismiss correlations with life outcomes if they weaken w/such controls, but they may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater:
annualreviews.org/content/journa…

13/ If we find a correlation between children’s stress and sleep, and it becomes insignificant after controlling for parental stress, we wouldn’t conclude that the link between children’s stress and sleep was meaningless.

14/ I think the idea that traditional tests have been "debunked" isn't quite right. Yes, we've found that whether kids wait to eat a marshmallow depends on many things, like whether they trust an adult to follow through on promises and how much their culture practices waiting.

15/ To me, this means we need to EXPAND our answer to why kids' behaviors predict life outcomes, not ABANDON the question (and paradigms) altogether. Trust and habits may influence whether people engage executive functions on assessments and in daily life:
authors.elsevier.com/a/1jrb1,rU%7EN…