ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
The cultural construction of "executive function".
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Genetic landscape of adult executive function reveals a cell-type-specific developmental origin.Nature communications · 2026Pooled it
- Emergent blink rate in early childhood is associated with neural origins of executive function.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Executive Function from Observation and Reflection Tool (EFFORT): Validation of a Culturally Adaptable and Publicly Available Item Bank in Seven Countries.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Reply to Mazzaferro et al. and Niebaum: The limits of alignment: Grounding executive functions without assuming special contexts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The case for contextually grounded executive function measurement.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Standard EF tasks can still have predictive validity within diverse cultural contexts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Recent Advances in Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation for the Treatment of Post-Stroke Cognitive Impairment.CNS neuroscience & therapeutics · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In cognitive science, the term "executive function" (EF) refers to universal features of the mind. Yet, almost all results described as measuring EF may actually reflect culturally specific cognitive capacities. After all, typical EF measures require forms of decontextualized/arbitrary processing which decades of cross-cultural work indicate develop primarily in "schooled worlds"-industrialized societies with universal schooling. Here, we report comparisons of performance on typical EF tasks by children inside, and wholly outside schooled worlds. Namely, children ages 5 to 18 from a postindustrial context with universal schooling (UK) and their peers in a rural, nonindustrialized context with no exposure to schooling (Kunene region, Namibia/Angola), as well as two samples with intermediate exposure to schooled worlds. In line with extensive previous work on decontextualized/arbitrary processing across such groups, we find skills measured by typical EF tasks do not develop universally: Children from rural groups with limited or no formal schooling show profound, sometimes qualitative, differences in performance compared to their schooled peers and, especially, compared to a "typical" schooled-world sample. In sum, some form of latent cognitive control capacities are obviously crucial in
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.