Integrating attention, working memory, and word learning in a dynamic field theory of executive function development: Moving beyond the ‘component’ view of executive function

• Published in: Developmental review 2025-03, Vol.75, p.101182, Article 101182
• Main Authors: Spencer, John P., Buss, Aaron T., McCraw, Alexis R., Johns, Eleanor, Samuelson, Larissa K.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attention; Cognitive development; Dynamic field theory; Executive function; Neural networks; Working memory
• ISSN: 0273-2297
• DOI: 10.1016/j.dr.2024.101182

•Presents a neural theory of executive function (EF) that integrates attention, working memory, and word learning processes.•Captures data from canonical EF and word learning tasks.•Provides a framework for understanding how EF emerges from component processes that themselves develop. Executive functions (EFs) are core cognitive abilities that enable self-control and flexibility. EFs undergo transformational changes between 3 to 5 years of age; critically, individual differences in these abilities are predictive of longer-term outcomes. Thus, a key question is how EFs change in early development. This question is complicated by evidence that EFs are supported by attentional, inhibitory, working memory, and task switching processes, ‘component’ abilities which themselves change over time. Thus, understanding the early development of EFs requires a framework for understanding how attention, working memory, and other abilities develop and how they are integrated to enable new EF skills. Here, we take a theory-based approach to this problem, building a neural process model that integrates multiple neurocognitive processes together and grounds these processes in perception–action dynamics. We then explore how EFs emerge from these integrated processes over development. In particular, we extend prior work showing how the concepts of dynamic field theory explain the emergence of EFs in the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task by integrating our theory of EF with a new model of visual exploration and word learning (WOLVES). This integration (WOLVES 2.0) specifies how visual-spatial attention, visual working memory, auditory-visual word representations, and top-down attention mechanisms come together to enable EFs from 3 to 5 years. Our central hypothesis is that children learn autonomous self-control by using language to guide attention to key features of the world in context. We demonstrate this, showing how, for example, children’s learning of individual colour words and the associations among colour words and the word ‘colour’ gradually enable dimensional attention. More generally, we use WOLVES 2.0 as a concrete framework to explore how the concept of executive functions can be moved beyond the ‘component’ view towards a developmental systems perspective.