Children’s ability to stay on task and control their behavior may not just be based on the internal workings of the brain but on outside factors as well, found researchers from WSU, Doctrina Education Consulting and the University of Tennessee.
Researchers dove into what executive functioning in children looks like by studying how the brain operates more broadly instead of focusing on specific brain regions, which earlier research focused on, said Aaron Buss, co-author on the study and associate professor at the University of Tennessee.
Executive functioning is any process where people utilize control or engage in goal-directed behaviors, like a person’s ability to resist a donut when they are trying to lose weight, Buss said. To measure executive functioning in children, they were tested using various tasks.