Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Executive functions are essential for adaptive behavior, but there is substantial variability in the way these functions are assessed. Unfortunately, the literature has mostly focused on tasks rather than the processes involved in those tasks. Adopting a process-based rather than a task-based approach could improve the assessment and conceptualization of executive functions. We systematically reviewed literature on how researchers assess executive functioning, including the tasks used and the processes involved in those tasks. We included studies measuring inhibition (n = 844), updating (n = 844) or shifting (n = 1048) among human participants with any performance-based measure. The results show that researchers have used many different tasks to measure the same concept, but tasks supposed to target the same executive function can actually engage very different processes. In addition, the participants' age or disorder has a significant effect on the type of tasks retained to assess the same executive function and the processes they involve, which means developmental literature does not necessarily assess the same "inhibition" as the adult neuropsychological literature. Our review underlines the importance of using multiple tasks to measure inhibition, updating or shifting, and the importance of clarifying and reporting on the processes supposed to be involved in these tasks, moving from a task-based approach to a more realistic process-based approach.