Central Executive Functions Overview

Central Executive Overview

• The central executive organizes and coordinates cognitive processes to achieve current goals.
• It is actively employed during reading, problem-solving, and multitasking.

Location and Functionality

• The central executive is located primarily in the prefrontal cortex.
• It involves three basic processes: inhibition, shifting, and updating, as proposed by Miyake et al.

Key Executive Processes

• Inhibition: The ability to intentionally stop automatic or dominant responses.
• Shifting: Flexibility in moving between different tasks or mental sets.
• Updating: Keeping track of information in working memory and revising necessary details.

Brain Activation and Executive Functions

• Different regions of the prefrontal cortex activate for each executive process:
  • Right intraparietal sulcus: Selective attention to relevant stimuli.
  • Left superior parietal sulcus: Involvement in switching and integration tasks.
  • Lateral prefrontal cortex: Responsible for monitoring and updating.

Unity of Executive Processes

• Each executive function has unique aspects and commonalities across processes.
• Evidence for unity includes fMRI scans showing activation overlap among different functions.
• Dual-task performance is noted as a missing element in Miyake's framework.

Impact of Brain Damage

• Damage to the frontal lobes can lead to dysexecutive syndrome, characterized by impaired central executive functioning.
• Stuss and Alexander identified three executive processes in the frontal lobes: task setting, monitoring, and energization.

Specific Executive Functions

• Task Setting: Involves planning, found in the left lateral frontal cortex.
• Monitoring: Reassessing tasks for execution quality, located in the right lateral frontal cortex.
• Energization: Sustaining attention and concentration, associated with the superior medial region of the frontal cortex.

Metacognition and Model Weaknesses

• Metacognition integrates and orchestrates information for better cognitive processing.
• A weakness of Stuss's model is that distinctions between processes diminish in healthy individuals due to high correlation among functions.

Episodic Buffer in Working Memory

• The episodic buffer serves as a temporary store integrating information, holding details briefly.
• It was added to the working memory model to address limitations of the original framework.
• This buffer allows for combining long-term memory information with data from other memory components like the phonological loop.

Research Findings Related to the Episodic Buffer

• Baddeley and Wilson's study indicated the capacity of the episodic buffer is around four chunks.
• Amnesic patients showed poor immediate prose recall linked to inadequate central executive functioning.
• The hippocampus is associated with the episodic buffer's function.

Additional Research

• Rudner et al. researched language processing, leading to activation in the left hippocampus when combining sign language and speech representations.