DEBORAH ZAITCHIK: These are individuals who seem to quickly
take up information and see the relevance of it, right, so
they're monitoring their own understanding. If you say
something that they don't understand, they're gonna stop
and think about it. If you give them, for example, let's say
you're a first grader, right, and you don't yet have a
biological understanding of life. You've got more of a
behavioral understanding, right. So to be alive is to move and be
active and do stuff, right? Now, you're in first grade and your
teacher says you know trees are alive, right, what do you do
with that? The high executive function kids are gonna stop,
they're gonna stop and they're gonna think, oh, wait a minute,
something's wrong here, right. They're gonna hold that
representation in mind. They're gonna seek more information
about it. They're going to keep it in mind and try to
figure it out.
People who have stronger executive functions are better
at monitoring when they don't understand at keeping the
representations active and working on it to try to puzzle
it out, right. They're better at shifting from one context to
another, right, understanding which context they're in, they
can more seamlessly shift, they're better at inhibiting the
wrong response even if it's very salient, right. So in that sense
you can, you can predict from – it sort of makes sense, let's
put it that way, that people who are stronger in those
cognitive thoughts will find it easier to learn,
especially, abstract knowledge.
There's a lot of educational work and development
of cognitive enhancement curricula, right. A lot of this
is being done in pre-schools with pre-school children and
it's very promising.
Interestingly, I think, where they've shown
real promise is with poorer children so we know that
low SES kids come to kindergarten with low executive
functions compared to higher SES kids. And that has cascading
effects all through their school lives and beyond school, of
course because this is sort of a set up for difficulty in life to
have low executive functions. And in that situation, I think,
we – I think we can safely say at this point from the research
of other labs, again this isn't our own work, that one can
increase cognitive – one can increase executive functions
and, thereby, increase reading readiness,
literacy, math readiness.
Now, both Alzheimer's patients and healthy elderly
have relatively weaker executive functions than healthy young
adults. And healthy elderly, they're significantly worse but
still they have executive functions strengths. The
Alzheimer patients have really, it's as if they've fallen off
the cliff. In every group the precise executive function
measures that we collect predict how well they will do on the
conceptual test that we give. And that's pretty staggering. I
mean you wouldn't necessarily expect that certainly in healthy
elderly, but our thinking now is that the healthy elderly are
very useful, they give us a very good window on how executive
function might be affecting conceptual reasoning. So in
their case, it could be that it's a – what you might call an
expression problem, that is, they've got a biological
conceptual understanding, but they're not using it now, right,
they're just not expressing what they know. In young children,
healthy young children, they're still developing the biology as
well as the executive function.
I guess, the most surprising thing I saw
was that my Alzheimer patients looked exactly
like four year olds. You could put – you could lay the
data on top of each other. You would not know who was four
years old and who was a moderate Alzheimer's patient.
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