Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 129, Issue 1, September 2008, Pages 32-48
Acta Psychologica

More dissociations and interactions within central executive functioning: A comprehensive latent-variable analysis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.04.004Get rights and content

Abstract

The present study examined the separability of six executive functions (verbal storage-and-processing coordination, visuospatial storage-and-processing coordination, dual-task coordination, strategic retrieval, selective attention, and shifting) and their relationships, by means of confirmatory factor analysis. A set of tasks thought to primarily assess each target function was administered to 180 participants. The results demonstrated that five of the six functions initially considered were distinguishable albeit related constructs, with one of these functions combining inhibitory and strategic retrieval processes. The analyses failed to reveal a single dual-task coordination ability underlying performance on the dual-tasks. These findings provide further support for the fractionation of the central executive into several functions and also stress the need to approach executive functioning in terms of both dissociations within general functions and specific interactions between some of these functions.

Introduction

A large number of theoretical and empirical studies have been conducted over the last decade to make it possible to define the functioning of the control component of working memory (Baddeley, 1986, Baddeley and Hitch, 1974), i.e. the central executive. The functional analogy suggested by Baddeley between the central executive and the supervisory attentional system in Norman and Shallice’s (1980) model of attentional control represented a first step in this direction. The attentional nature of the central executive has also been emphasized by much other subsequent research (Baddeley and Logie, 1999, Engle et al., 1999, Miyake and Shah, 1999). Baddeley (1996) then proposed several avenues of research intended to contribute to the study of the central executive, each of which potentially corresponding to a “general” function assumed by this component. He thus distinguished between the coordination of two concurrent tasks or mental processes, the alternation between response strategies (flexibility), the selective attention function, and the activation and retrieval of information in long-term memory (LTM).

This manner of addressing the study of central executive functioning raises the question of its fractionation. Several contemporary and subsequent empirical studies have indeed cast doubt on a unitary conception of the central executive. These studies used a wide variety of experimental paradigms, methodologies, and were conducted in various target populations: there are thus clinical and experimental studies in brain-damaged patients (Burgess et al., 1998, Duncan et al., 1997, Godefroy et al., 1999), correlational studies, as well as exploratory and confirmatory analyses in healthy young adults (Friedman and Miyake, 2004, Lehto, 1996, Miyake et al., 2000), healthy elderly adults (Fisk and Sharp, 2004, Hedden and Yoon, 2006, Lowe and Rabbitt, 1997, Robbins et al., 1998), demented elderly adults (Collette, Van der Linden, & Salmon, 1999), and children (Lehto et al., 2003, Levin et al., 1991, StClair-Thompson and Gathercole, 2006). All these studies suggest the existence of several control functions – or “executive functions” as they are usually called in neuropsychology – that encompass a variety of processes which interact but can nevertheless operate in a relatively independent way. While most of these studies have focused on a few specific aspects of executive functioning, some of the more recent research has attempted to provide a comprehensive account of executive functions, while also trying to gain a better understanding of their interrelationships.

Among these latter studies, we can identify two types of approach. The first is based on clinical observations and/or correlational analyses and consists in demonstrating the relationships or lack of relationships between performances on tasks which are thought to assess different executive functions. The second approach, based on hypothesis testing procedures such as confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), consists in testing theoretical models of how different control functions interact with one another.

Research conducted in the context of the first approach classically reports dissociations between performance on executive tasks and/or the presence or absence of significant correlations between such tasks. While the details of the results differ across studies (a fact which can be partially explained by the different tasks employed), researchers consistently report that the correlations between the different tasks are nonsignificant or weak, and that several independent factors are responsible for the overall performance. For example, Lehto (1996) reported that there was no relationship between the performances obtained by young adults in different tasks assessing executive and storage-and-processing functions. Similarly, Collette et al.’s (1999) study indicated that the performance of patients with Alzheimer’s disease in a series of executive tasks loaded mainly on two independent factors which were defined as representing inhibitory processes on one hand, and the coordination between storage and processing operations on the other. This kind of approach to the exploration of the central executive is, however, constrained by a number of theoretical and methodological limitations (Burgess, 1997, Rabbitt, 1997), which seriously complicate the interpretation of the results. One of these limitations concerns the assessment of the functions attributed to the central executive, since the fact that these functions are not clearly defined means that they are difficult to operationalize. Another limitation is that executive tasks are, in essence, impure measures, because they necessarily involve both executive and non-executive processes and, consequently, individual performance on these tasks may be biased by the non-executive requirements of the task. Moreover, the specific contribution of non-executive processes to performance can vary greatly from one task to another as well as from one participant to another, thus making it difficult to isolate specific executive processes.

The second kind of approach is more recent and was developed to address these limitations. The work performed by Miyake et al. (2000) represents an important starting point for such research. It uses a latent variable procedure in which the variance shared among a set of tasks selected to measure one and the same underlying construct (i.e. executive function) is statistically extracted, while the specific requirements of each task and measurement error are removed, thus minimizing the task impurity problem. This shared variance represents the latent variable of interest and it is possible to examine how different latent variables relate to one another. These authors used this technique to examine the relationships between three frequently postulated executive functions (mental set shifting, inhibition of prepotent responses, and updating the contents of working memory), and to specify how they are organized. The relationships were thus examined at the level of latent variables, i.e. what is common to multiple tasks chosen to tap the same underlying construct but not at the level of manifest variables, i.e. individual tasks. The comparison of several CFA models led the authors to conclude that the three considered functions, though moderately correlated, were clearly separable. This approach is now in widespread use to explore the relationships among executive functions themselves as well as between executive functions and other important higher-level cognitive constructs such as fluid intelligence (gf) or working memory capacity (e.g., Friedman and Miyake, 2004, Hedden and Yoon, 2006, Miyake et al., 2001, Salthouse et al., 2003).

The study presented here uses the same approach to investigate the relationships among a large set of executive functions chosen on the basis of the results obtained from a previous exploratory study (Fournier, Larigauderie, & Gaonac’h, 2004). This earlier study represented a first attempt to bring together the main functions previously subsumed under the term “central executive”, namely coordination, inhibition, retrieval from LTM, and planning (Baddeley, 1996, Collette and Van der Linden, 2002, Shallice, 1982), by exploring the factorial structure of a comprehensive sample of executive and working memory tasks that are thought to assess these functions. A principal components analysis (PCA) suggested that the performances of 65 young adults on the selected tasks loaded mainly on five factors which were defined as corresponding to (1) the ability to inhibit prepotent responses in association with strategic retrieval from LTM, (2) the ability to inhibit distracting information when selecting the relevant information, (3) the ability to coordinate the storage and processing of verbal information, (4) the ability to coordinate the storage and processing of visuospatial information, and (5) the ability to coordinate different processing operations without storage. The pattern of results demonstrated that the different facets of the central executive are based, at least in part, on distinct functions, and consequently support the executive fractionation hypothesis. However, the results also suggested that a theoretical fractionation of central executive functioning into very general functions such as coordination, inhibition, and retrieval from LTM does not correspond to any empirical reality, and that more fine-grained dissociations within these functions (e.g., verbal versus visuospatial coordination abilities) as well as specific interactions between some of these functions (e.g., inhibition and strategic retrieval abilities) should be considered. Overall, these findings were taken as the starting point for the current research and led us to focus on a set of functions relating to various domains of executive functioning. Thus, these earlier exploratory data, along with exploratory and confirmatory data from the literature, served to guide the selection, definition and assessment of the target functions in the present study, and also provided the basis for specifying an a priori model of how these functions are organized. This model was tested using CFA.

Section snippets

The central executive functions considered in the present study

Our previous study had clearly indicated that it is essential to distinguish between two coordination abilities: the ability to coordinate the storage and processing of verbal information, and the ability to coordinate the storage and processing of visuospatial information. This observation echoes a number of other studies that have reported dissociations between verbal/numerical and visuospatial storage-and-processing tasks (Friedman and Miyake, 2000, Jarvis and Gathercole, 2003, Oberauer et

Participants

The participants consisted of 180 undergraduate or graduate students at the University of Poitiers. Their age ranged from 18 to 31 years (mean age = 23.62 ± 3.24 years), and 50% were female. All the participants were native French speakers and took part voluntarily in the study.

Materials, design, and procedure

All the participants completed the 19 tasks thought to assess the six executive functions we were studying. First, we directed our choice towards tasks classically used in cognitive and neuropsychological studies and/or in

Results and discussion

The results are presented in three sections. First, the procedure for screening the data is presented. Second, descriptive statistics and Bravais–Pearson correlations are presented. Finally, the CFA analyses which test the separability of the target functions are presented.

General discussion

The goal of the present study was to examine the separability of six central executive functions: verbal storage-and-processing coordination, visuospatial storage-and-processing coordination, dual-task coordination, strategic retrieval, selective attention and shifting. The results of the CFA demonstrated that five of the six initially considered central executive functions were separable, albeit related, constructs. Because of the lack of convergent validity among dual-task measures, these

Concluding remarks

The present findings suggest that dissociations within executive functions and specific interactions between some of these functions must both be taken into account if we are to improve our knowledge and understanding of executive functioning. The results reported here, together with those from an earlier study (Fournier et al., 2004), confirm that a fractionation of central executive functioning in terms of general functions such as “coordination”, “inhibition”, and “LTM retrieval” does not

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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