Executive function. What do you suppose that is? Mental health professionals, educators and others use this term when talking about ways that people exercise self-control. Executive function involves the skills we need to organize our lives.
Experts at the National Center for Learning Disabilities say we use executive function to study situations, plan, act and change our minds. They say problems with executive function are strongly linked to attention deficits and learning disabilities.
All of these problems can have some of the same signs -- for example, trouble with working memory. What is working memory? This term is commonly used now in place of short-term memory. It describes the brain's ability to store recent information temporarily, but also to use and make sense of it.