Emergence of Executive Function in Infancy

The early building blocks of executive functions (EFs) are acquired during infancy and undergo remarkable improvement. In the span of a few short years, infants become capable of sustaining, shifting, and inhibiting their attention, and eventually use these gains in attentional control to hold and update information in mind and exert control over their behavior in the presence of interfering thoughts and actions. EFs are a set of higher-order cognitive processes involved in coordinating, planning, and completing goal-directed actions. Varying theoretical perspectives of EF have emphasized a unitary construct, dissociable components, or an integrative framework underscoring both “unity and diversity”. The measurement of EF during infancy offers particular challenges as tasks must be sensitive to limitations in young participants’ motor skills as well as their receptive and productive language abilities. The delayed response task is a widely used nonverbal working memory task in human and nonhuman animals that is dependent on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.