~Class 17 - Executive Functions and ADHD Flashcards
What are Executive Functions?
Executive Functions are a set of cognitive processes that allow us to engage in goal-directed behaviour and exercise control.
Executive Functions include the ability to ___, ___, and ___ relevant information for a task.
organize // prioritize // activate
What function is referred to as “The air traffic controller of the mind”?
Executive Functions
Executive Functioning also deals with ___ and ___, like keeping a big-picture end-goal, and monitoring your progress towards it.
higher-level cognitive tasks // abilities
What are the 3 main aspects of Executive Functioning?
Working Memory, Inhibition, Cognitive Flexibility
What is Working Memory?
The raw capacity to keep information in mind. Involves controlling the information in working memory
What is Inhibition?
The ability to control and suppress distracting stimuli (both internal and external); suppress behaviours.
What is Cognitive Flexibility?
The ability to change course when the task demands change, or when you’ve evaluated that the thing you’re currently doing isn’t working out as effectively as you’d hoped. Involves shifting between mental states, rules, or tasks
What part of the brain is most heavily implicated in executive functioning skills, including the ability to inhibit behaviours and thoughts?
The Prefrontal Cortex
Inhibition facilitates ___; frees working memory capacity → aids problem-solving & ___
selective attention // reasoning
Inhibition improves gradually from ___ onward.
infancy
What task is good for testing children’s Inhibition skills?
The Day/Night Stroop Task
How well can 3-4y/o perform the Day/Night Stroop Task?
3-4y/o can do it some of the time, but make a lot of errors, 65-70% accurate
How do children aged 6-7 perform on executive function and inhibition tasks?
Children aged 6-7 Succeed at complex executive functioning tasks that require inhibiting distracting stimuli
Do adults or teens have better executive function and inhibition skills?
Adolescents have pretty good executive functioning and inhibition skills, even fairly early on, this is especially true if you are testing their ability under ideal circumstances, like a lab circumstance, by 16y/o.
Preschoolers can improve in their inhibition skills if they are provided with ___ and the right support:
scaffolding
How can you help preschoolers improve their inhibition skills?
External aids; games requiring inhibition & rule-switching; pretend play
How does a 3y/o perform on the card-sort task?
3y/o can sort the cards, but struggles to shift their approach when the instructions change.
Before age 5, children tend to ___ rather than shifting to a new strategy/approach
perseverate
Why will children sometimes default to the less effective strategy even after discovering a great strategy?
Because the strain of applying the new strategy is taxing their limited cognitive resources, so when they get this new problem and when they try to deploy their new and more efficient strategy, sometimes it overwhelms their mental capacity to the point where they don’t have enough cognitive resources left to do the counting and addition to solve the problem.
In those situations where they are discovering a new and more effective strategy, but trying to apply it to a new problem, they will frequently default to an older less efficient and less effective strategy, because it got the job done, and wasn’t as taxing.
How do 5-6y/o perform on the card-sort task?
They get much better at the cognitive flexibility to switch from one strategy to the next, and they could do the card-sort task with more ease.
What is the problem with lab-based tasks to measure the pure capacity to inhibit behaviours or to switch tasks?
When kids are making decisions about how to accomplish a task or avoid a certain behaviour, in their everyday lives, executive functions are only one piece of the larger picture that governs how they’re going to behave.
What are the 4 things that are a lot easier to intervene on when we’re trying to help children resist the urge to engage in inappropriate behaviour for a particular situation?
- Knowledge
- Beliefs/Values
- Social Skills
- Strategies
What does it mean when people say that ADHD is heterogenous?
This means that people with the same diagnosis can have dramatically different clinical presentations, the challenges they face, and the symptoms they experience.
To get diagnosed with ADHD you must experience at least ___ possible symptoms in at least ___ possible clusters.
6/9 // 1/2
There are ___ different ways of having at least 6 of the symptoms in a cluster
130
Overall, there are ___ different symptom combinations that could result in an ADHD diagnosis
115,960
What is Inattention?
Inattention: Refers to an inability to sustain attention & stick to tasks, to remember and follow through on instructions, and to resist distractions. (A better term might be “attention dysregulation”)
Why is Inattention is a misnomer?
It suggests that they don’t have the raw attentional capacity to focus on the things they need to pay attention to.
We’re increasingly recognizing that the inattention in adhd, might be better described as difficulty regulating your attention.
ADHD almost involves an abundance of attention, in a sense that, in some contexts, you want to focus on everything, everything is interesting to you, you are casting a wide net. Distractibility can become a problem because your attention is spread over so many different parts of your environment.
What is Hyperfocus?
In some situations, people with ADHD who struggle with Inattention will get so laser-focused on one thing that it’s like they are zoomed in on that, and are excluding everything else.
What skills do people with Inattentive ADHD struggle with?
Selective Attention, Sustained Attention, and Alerting
What is Altering?
Involves initial reaction to stimulus and ability to prepare. Deficit may contribute to difficulties with sustained attention.
Do kids with ADHD and kids without ADHD have the same Attentional Capacity?
Yes, kids with ADHD can attend to & remember the same amount of information as kids without.
Hyperactivity and Impulsivity are ___, but ___ in practice
conceptually distinct // highly related
Can you Hyperactive and not Impulsive, and vice versa?
Yes, but they do tend to go hand-in-hand with one another, and are treated as a single category.
Is Inattention or H-I more predominant among children?
Inattention
We typically see that children who are high in this Hyperactivity-Impulsivity dimension show activity that is really energetic and intense, but doesn’t tend to be ___.
goal-directed
In children with ADHD in the H-I dimension, amount of activity linked with ___.
environmental demands
Although the broad clusters of symptoms in ADHD are Inattention and H-I, most of the symptoms that are actually used to diagnose ADHD have at least some degree of connection to an underlying ___ difficulty that tends to be at the core of peoples experience with ADHD.
Executive functioning
People with ADHD will often report feeling excessive levels of ___ during the day.
drowsiness
You sometimes see ___ of taking in and integrating information in people with ADHD, and when you couple those things with some of the other challenges, in day to day life it can result in a difficulty in completing tasks on time and when you had intended to.
slow processing speed
At what age can you reliably diagnose ADHD?
Age 3
What does it mean when they say ADHD is a developmental diagnosis?
It exists from birth to early in childhood. Given that, there is a very good chance that there are some early signs of ADHD, but our ability to detect those things reliably and use that to predict an individual child’s trajectory is still pretty limited.
What are the symptoms of ADHD in infants?
- Difficult temperament
- Extremely active
- Erratic sleep patterns
ADHD diagnoses are based on ___ reports.
retrospective
What are the symptoms of ADHD during preschool?
- Symptoms become increasingly visible as hyperactivity increases
- More mobile/independent! Act without thinking
- Oppositional behaviours and difficulty resisting temptation predict ongoing ADHD-related difficulties
At what age does salience of Hyperactivity drop off?
Elementary school
