The ecological validity of tests of executive function

Abstract

Ninety-two mixed etiology neurological patients and 216 control participants were assessed on a range of neuropsychological tests, including 10 neuropsychological measures of executive function derived from 6 different tests. People who knew the patients well (relatives or carers) completed a questionnaire about the patient's dysexecutive problems in everyday life, and this paper reports the extent to which the tests predicted the patients' everyday life problems. All of the tests were significantly predictive of at least some of the behavioral and cognitive deficits reported by patients' carers. However, factor analysis of the patients' dysexecutive symptoms suggested a fractionation of the dysexecutive syndrome, with neuropsychological tests loading differentially on 3 underlying cognitive factors (Inhibition, Intentionality, and Executive Memory), supporting the conclusions that different tests measure different cognitive processes, and that there may be limits to the fractionation of the executive system. (JINS, 1998, 4, 547-558.)

The Role of Executive Control in Human Drug Addiction

“…Examples of tests used to examine executive processes include dual-task performance, Stroop, Wisconsin Card Sorting, Tower of London, delayed alternation, and assorted working memory (WM) tasks. Such paradigms have proved a reliable method for demonstrating executive control deficits across a range of clinical conditions (Dalrymple-Alford et al 1994;Diamond 1996;Baddeley et al 1997;Barkley 1997;Diamond et al 1997;Konrad et al 2000;Baddeley et al 2001;Bennetto et al 2001;Gilotty et al 2002;Sharma and Antonova 2003;Simon et al 2003), with recent work also indicating a strong relationship between executive control deficits on laboratory tasks and real-world behavioral problems (Burgess et al 1998;Kibby et al 1998;Moriyama et al 2002;Kalechstein et al 2003a;Odhuba et al 2005;Chaytor et al 2006). …”

Brain imaging of the central executive component of working memory

“…For example, Shallice and Burgess [22,110] described frontal patients with a correct performance on a task assessing inhibitory processes (the Hayling task) but impaired performance on another task evaluating rules detection (the Brixton test), while other patients demonstrated the reverse profile. Another line of evidence for the nonunitary nature of the central executive comes from group studies which examined executive functions in several target populations, including normal young adults [71], normal elderly adults [74,101] and brain-damaged patients [19,20,42]. All these studies employed a large battery of widely used executive tasks and examined how well these tasks correlated with one another.…”

Cross-syndrome comparison of real-world executive functioning and problem solving using a new problem-solving questionnaire

“…This is a pertinent consideration with regard to EF research. As noted in the Introduction, tasks which measure EFs in experimental settings have been questioned in terms of their ecological validity (Burgess et al, 1998;. In EF research, dual issues arise: first, of relying on subjective questionnaire reports in order to index behaviour outside the laboratory, and second, of measuring abilities which may actually qualitatively differ between experimental and everyday contexts: indeed, Toplak et al (2013) proposed them to be measuring different constructs entirely.…”

“…Whilst acknowledging some association between laboratory and everyday EF measures, the ecological validity of experimental EF tasks has been called into question with respect to their generalisability and representativeness (Burgess, Alderman, Evans, Emslie, & Wilson, 1998;Burgess et al, 2006). Indeed, experimental EF tests and everyday EF rating scales are thought to tap different processes (Toplak, West, & Stanovich, 2013).…”