Self-control and other forms of executive function in the brain may be misunderstood. Differences in people’s capacity for executive function might not be purely innate. People might also be constantly deciding — from their first years of life — whether using their executive function is worth the effort.
A new review paper from the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain suggests that a person’s environment in early childhood has much more to do with how they engage executive function — like exerting self-control — throughout their lives than innate ability. This new understanding of executive function helps explain its lasting impact on our education, mental and physical health, relationships and even lifelong earnings.
“From this perspective, people may have similar executive function capacities but they live in environments that vary in whether executive function feels worth engaging,” said Jesse Niebaum, the paper’s lead author and a project scientist in the Cognition in Context Lab at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain.
The paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
What the marshmallow test missed about self-control
Executive function describes how our brain controls our thoughts and actions related to accomplishing our goals. These are skills that include paying attention, planning and problem solving. Executive function develops across childhood and predicts lifelong success.
One famous experiment with executive function involved offering young children two marshmallows later on if they could resist eating one right now. The kids who could not wait were described has having a lower competency for flexible attention control, which is now recognized as an aspect of executive function.&bsp;
According to the common understanding of executive function in the field of psychology, people’s capacity for executive control — like the ability to wait for double the marshmallows — varies from person to person as it increases across their development.
“According to this idea, the kid who can’t resist eating one marshmallow now instead of waiting for two later on gets better at resisting temptation with development but still becomes the adult who can’t resist binge-watching TV shows,” said Yuko Munakata, a professor of psychology and senior author on this new paper.
However, this traditional understanding underestimates how sensitive children are to their environments, and how those environments might shape their willingness to use their capacity for executive function.
Challenging the dominant model of executive function
This paper offers a different understanding of where the capacity for executive function starts. Instead of treating it like a specific capacity in itself, the researchers believe that capacity begins with the decision to use it at all. People may have similar executive function capacities, but their environments vary in how worthwhile it might be to use their executive function.
“Is a future reward worth resisting an immediate temptation for? Do people around me value controlled behavior? Is there an easier option? These are all choices, and these choices feed into future decisions,” said Munakata.
This paper suggests that the reason why interventions seeking to increase executive function have largely failed is because they treated executive function as a capacity that we can try to grow. It might be more effective to focus on how environment influences decisions to engage executive function.
For example, a child who gains a lot of practice and rewarding feedback while solving puzzles may decide to engage their executive function more frequently. That regular experience might create a habit of engaging executive function by repetition, which also reduces its mental effort. These same ideas apply to adults.
“Differences in executive function capacity should be viewed as a product of distinct learning histories, sociocultural influences and environmental contexts instead of solely as differences in capacities,” said Niebaum. “Our framework supports the development of habits that make it easier to engage executive function.”
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