Great Ideas from the Brain Sciences: Executive Functions—The Origins
By: Mirela C. C. Ramacciotti
Once upon a time, in a not very faraway land, I was giving a lecture on executive functions. When I mentioned that they were one of the most reliable predictors of academic success, a teacher raised her hand. Baffled by the term “executive,” she asked me: But how can I teach my class to deal with the demands of an executive? They are only children…
This story illustrates the importance of getting to basics when we strive to convey ideas. So, for starters, executive functions got their name when scientists distinguished between two kinds of plans of actions: automated, unconsciously made plans, and controlled, consciously made plans.
The person who was instrumental in this movement was the British experimental psychologist, Donald E. Broadbent (1926-1993). In 1953, Broadbent devised a model— the filter model—in which information for conscious awareness gets selected, while irrelevant information is discarded. Now, over to your classes: have you ever noticed how input comes preselected in language-learning materials so that students are driven to attend to bits of the text where the target vocabulary is used? That’s how information has been bottlenecked to assist learning. If the word bottlenecked caught your attention, you may be familiar with the alternative term that this model was given in later studies.
Before we move along the history lane, there is an interesting anecdote here that, once again, shows how ideas and people leave a great legacy over the course of history. Broadbent, upon participating in a pilot training program in the USA during the 2nd World War, noticed that pilots would get very confused when deciding to pull one of two levers that sat close together within the pilot’s reach but that served very different purposes—one would raise the flaps, while the other would release the wheels—thus leading to very distinct, and possibly disastrous, if unintentional, outcomes. Broadbent, at the time not yet into psychology, was deeply impressed by the role that attention and perception had in everyday life and in the decisions that we make on a routine basis. Broadbent noticed very early on how attention is a selection process and affects what we perceive of the world around and within us.
In a different part of the world, Alexander R. Luria, who we talked about in the December 2024 issue (see here), was performing a series of experiments in Russia—the USSR at the time—with patients who had suffered some brain damage and showed difficulty in performing a series of actions leading to a goal. At the time, the term dysexecutive syndrome was used to refer to the set of disorganized actions and plans to perform routine tasks.
In the 1970s, many researchers were instrumental in advancing theoretical ideas about attention. Michael Posner (who we also talked about in the May 2025 issue here) joined forces with Charles Snyder to develop what became known as the expectancy-priming paradigm. The paradigm involves an experiment testing people on what they expect after different symbols (either a letter or a plus sign) were shown to them before they had to make a judgement if a pair of letters were the same or different. Today it is not difficult to infer that the letter is the one that primes them for better predictions. Back then, this led to the notion that, when primed with one kind of stimulus, like a letter, attention is directed towards similar stimuli. Further, Posner and Snyder discovered that there is a cognitive cost associated with reallocating attention to something that is not expected. This led to the idea of cognitive control. For teachers, there is an important message here: do not let distractions permeate students’ execution during a task.
Also in the 1970s, Richard Schiffrin and Walter Schneider (1977) theorized that there must be two different streams for the processing of stimuli, as attention is limited, leading to the development of their dual processing theory. When something is automatic because it has been learned and trained so many times before, attention is not activated, whereas in controlled processes, full attention is required. In the classroom you might have noticed this often when students need to deal with novel tasks involving a new set of vocabulary or a new grammar point. At that moment, their attention needs to be given to the task lest they miss the whole point. With time and intentional practice, these new tasks get categorized and become part of the “automatic” or learned repertoire of the students.
Still in the 1970s—what a decade!—the attention element that is pervasive in our understanding of executive functions received some reinforcement. This time from memory. Alan D. Baddeley, who we will appreciate in a dedicated future feature of this series, developed a model of rehearsal processes—a three-component model that was later joined by a buffer and became the central executive model, showing that rehearsal processes are important for goal-directed behavior. In 1974, together with Graham J. Hitch, he proposed a system that allowed for two different processes in working memory: updating and manipulating information. That model underscored the importance of verbally rehearsing information—thus the phonological loop component (which, together with the visuospatial pad and the central executive, formed the three-component model). This is so interesting to observe in children when they have to execute a task. Notice how often they repeat to themselves what needs doing so as not to forget the task.
In the 1990s, attention and memory were joined with the important element of inhibition by means of interference control. That came along with the works of Joaquin M. Fuster. As a neurologist and neuroscientist, Fuster highlighted that executive functioning served a purpose: to organize behavior. As organization is a time-related process, the same would happen in the brain. By means of a synthesis of different processes (sensorial and motor), both in short-term memory and attentional systems, execution of an action—the uppermost characteristic of executive functions—would happen across time following the hierarchical organization of our cerebral cortex. Thus came the cross-temporal synthesis model.
Now that we have aligned attention, working memory, and inhibition, it’s time for me to obey the constraints of space—my space, more specifically. To let you know what the 2000s gave us in terms of ideas about executive functions, I’ll need twice as much space. So, rein in your curiosity, rehearse the information you’ve learned so far, and I’ll meet you here, in the next issue, to let you know more about how executive functions came into our learning contexts.
References
Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. J. (1994). Developments in the concept of working memory. Neuropsychology, 8(4), 485-493.
Broadbent, D. E. (1958). Perception and communication. Pergamon.
Fuster, J. M. (2000). Executive frontal functions. Experimental Brain Research, 133(1), 66–70.
Luria, A. R. (1963). Restoration of function after brain injury. Pergamon Press.
Luria, A. R. (1966). Human brain and psychological processes. Harper and Row.
Posner, M. I., & Snyder, C. R. R. (1975). Attention and cognitive control. In R. Solso (Ed.), Information processing and cognition: The Loyola symposium (pp. 55–85). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Schiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84(2), 127–190.
Mirela C. C. Ramacciotti is presently engaged as an external lecturer on the topic of Mind, Brain, and Education at the Graduate Level Course with the Psychology Department at the University of São Paulo. She holds a PhD in Neuroscience and Behavior and another in Human Communication Disorders.