Feminist theory and contemporary developmental psychology: The case of children’s executive function

Abstract

Burman’s landmark book, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, criticized the field from three perspectives: decontextualized measurements and depictions of children’s behavior; androcentric biases; and covert political frameworks. In this article, Burman’s analysis is applied to the current state of cognitive developmental research in general, and then specifically with a focus on a hot topic, children’s executive function (cognitive self-control). Suggestions are made for how adopting Burman’s framework to deconstruct executive function research and theorizing can be used to construct an enriched, more complete, account of the development of executive function.

Keywords

children cognition development executive function feminist theory

The purpose of this article is to examine contemporary cognitive developmental psychology in light of Erica Burman’s (1994, 2008a, 2008b) critique of this discipline, particularly her feminist perspective. We are developmental psychologists who have applied feminist principles to developmental psychology research and theorizing, and have attempted to construct new models of development in light of the work by Burman and others (Miller, 2000, 2005, 2006; Miller & Scholnick, 2000; Scholnick, 2000; Scholnick & Miller, 2007). In this article, we show the continued relevance and importance of Burman’s perspectives, as we focus on a current hot topic in developmental psychology—executive function (EF). We use EF as a focal point for evaluating the impact of feminist and deconstructionist thought on the developmental research enterprise. EF is currently one of the most active areas of research and theorizing on children’s cognitive skills (e.g. Best & Miller, 2010; Zelazo & Müller, 2011). EF refers to children’s ability to control their cognitive activities during goal-directed behavior, and is thought to include skills such as planning how to achieve a goal during problem-solving, inhibiting impulsive behavior, and shifting to a new problem-solving strategy when needed.

We will begin by presenting Burman’s critique of developmental psychology, identifying those parts that have not been adopted by the field and those parts that have enriched, or could enrich, the field. That is, we will discuss how Burman’s critique illuminates the current research enterprise, including its biases, and suggest changes that could be made in the research program to incorporate her objections. We will also address the limits to her critique, namely, the barriers to deconstructing a developmental domain. We then move to a consideration of EF, first showing how Burman’s perspective would critique it and then demonstrating how her perspective could enrich future work on that topic. Hopefully, this deconstruction and reconstruction can serve as a model to developmental psychology for how Burman’s perspective can provide a more complete and inclusive, and thus more ecologically valid, perspective on cognitive development. Moreover, our account aims to increase developmentalists’ awareness of their culturally situated assumptions.

Burman’s critique of developmental psychology

Burman’s critique of developmental psychology encompasses three perspectives:

Developmental research and theorizing on cognitive development constrain our understanding of children and their development. The positing of the abstract, universal child, whose biologically determined course of maturation pushes the child on a predetermined linear course toward maturity, leaves out the context from which the child is abstracted. These unacknowledged assumptions decontextualize children. Consequently, the importance of history and culture, including gender, class, and race, and the ways this context constructs children and their caretakers, is either ignored or distorted. Decontextualizing also masks the historical and cultural lenses through which investigators view children while inviting biological explanations. The normative picture excludes diversity and equates variations with pathology. Burman claims that this epistemological approach is a by-product of the application of the scientific method to the study of children, with its focus on universal objective truths derived from standardized methods of observation and measurement in standardized environments.

What child is the prototype for the abstract universal child? Burman argues that the assumed end point of development toward which children progress is the white, middle-class, Euro-American male. Maturity is defined from one idealized, privileged, racialized, and gendered perspective. Thus, the choice of topics for developmental study, such as the emergence of rationality, autonomy, and self-control, as well as the models of development (linear and progressive), narrow the data that are collected and the explanations that are offered. That is, what is lacking is an account focused on development in specific social locations defined by gender, race, and class.

There is a political dimension to these choices. A normative view of development leads toward intervention in parenting and educational practices. The perspective through which development is construed and viewed is politicized. There is a pernicious parallel between the model of children and the model of the international economic and political nature of societies. In that view, the “first world” of developed countries and mature children conform to the “neo-liberal,” Euro-American, masculine values of independence, autonomy, and entrepreneurship (Burman, 2008a, 2008b). Other societies with different social and economic structures and circumstances constitute the “third world.” Similarly, children and families associated with the third world (either in the third world or within the first world) may be perceived as a social problem to be remedied. An example of the latter is that the literature on African-American families in the US focuses on the ways in which these families are “dysfunctional” (from the perspective of the white majority), and does not consider their strengths using a feminist perspective that takes into account the US power structure defined by race, gender, and class. The model of children promulgated by developmental psychology fosters this hierarchical view of the social structure and perpetuates the social and economic inequities that developmental psychology ratifies.

Thus, Burman’s critique is designed to raise the consciousness of developmental psychologists and transform the methodology, epistemology, theorizing, and content of the field. What impact has Burman’s critique had? It depends on who is answering the question and on which of her three admittedly intertwined perspectives we address. We write from the perspective of one of the key targets of Burman’s critique—traditional Euro-American cognitive developmentalists interested in the growth of rationality and strategic thinking. But we also are aware of the contributions of feminist epistemologies, especially those emphasizing how a person’s social location within a hierarchical power structure defined by gender, race, and class shapes a person’s experiences and consequently the person’s cognition. In our view, elements of the first perspective of Burman’s critical analysis resonate with a small set of developmental psychologists who have focused on the social-cultural context of development (e.g. Cole, 2005; Rogoff, 2003) or have thought about developmental psychology from feminist perspectives (see various chapters in Miller & Scholnick, 2000). For example, some researchers studying moral reasoning use a framework that includes appreciation of the way experiences of social exclusion shape children’s concepts of fairness and connects social development with social justice (Killen & Rutland, 2011; Waynryb, Smetana, & Turiel, 2008). For these researchers, recontextualization has enriched their analyses and has the potential to do the same for other cognitive research. However, few researchers of cognitive development would embrace Burman’s critiques of the scientific method of standardization and decontextualization, which is at the core of their discipline.

Even fewer developmentalists are motivated by Burman’s second set of concerns. It is not apparent to most developmentalists that the choice of tasks, topics, and theoretical models reflects class and gender biases about the nature of maturity and how it is achieved. Nevertheless, there is theoretical and methodological space within the discipline to incorporate these aspects of Burman’s critique, as we discuss later.

The third perspective in Burman’s critical analysis, citing political and economic linkages, which are informed by a postmodern and Marxist world view, has had almost no impact in the arena of developmental psychology in which we operate. Critiques similar to Burman’s have been raised in historical analyses of the field (e.g. Borstelmann, 1983; Kessen, 1979) but they have not been tied to a Marxist political agenda. Whereas Burman has become increasingly more politically engaged, mainstream developmental psychology has moved in the opposite direction. As developmental psychology increasingly transforms itself into developmental science, it would be difficult for the field to shed its modernist trappings and still retain its disciplinary identity.

EF as an illustration of Burman’s critique

In the decades since Burman wrote her original critique of developmental research, which often reflected the Piagetian paradigm, research has shifted from stage theories with overt assumptions of a universal, linear, and hierarchical course of the development of rationality to cognitive processing models of memory and problem-solving. Not only have conceptualizations of the course of development changed, but so has the context, which now includes the brain. It is our contention that, nevertheless, Burman’s analysis remains relevant and deserves more attention. We illustrate this point by applying Burman’s critique to one of the hottest topics in research on problem-solving, executive functioning. Then, we pose a dilemma, which Burman has confronted too. Is the consequence of the deconstructionist analysis a shedding of the scientific method-based developmental paradigm and the study of thinking, or a reconstruction of it to investigate the various ways that diverse social and political systems constitute varied ways of thinking and the changing child?

The study of EF began with studies of adults with brain injuries, primarily in the prefrontal cortex, who were experiencing difficulties in problem-solving. The focus of the research was definition of these difficulties and precise location of affected brain functions. The research then expanded to include people with intellectual disabilities and normal children during the course of the maturation of the cortex. The domain of EF includes people’s ability to control their cognitive activities and their behavior when trying to solve a problem or achieve some other goal. People with high EF can inhibit impulsive behaviors, shift from thinking about a problem one way to thinking about it a different way, delay gratification, hold a large amount of information in mind and adjust and manipulate these representations as needed during problem-solving, construct good strategies for problem-solving, and more generally plan a good approach to the task at hand. Thus, good EF skills construct the ideal problem solver and the study of children is assumed to reveal the construction process. In order to illustrate the cogency of Burman’s critique of developmental psychology, we now address the research on children’s development of EF. We draw on the three analytic perspectives, described earlier, that we see in her critique. We assert that despite a change in focus from Piagetian stage theory to problem-solving, the same decontextualized, hierarchical, androcentric paradigm persists.

Perspective 1: Abstract, universal, decontextualized, “normal” child

Research on EF has focused on describing typical (and thus “normal”) executive functioning at each age, usually in middle-class populations. As with the study of adults, much of the early research in the field focused on developing psychometrically sound age-appropriate instruments for measuring EF and on research that links EF performance to data on brain functioning. From this work emerges an abstract, typical generic child. Research focuses on age more than context, on biology (the prefrontal cortex) more than experience, and on cognitive skills thought to be universally important rather than important in particular socio-historical contexts. Even the tasks used to study the deployment of EF skills often are abstract, incorporating color or shape dimensions as rules for sorting, for example. A few studies explore the impact of the home environment, often with a stereotypic and narrow lens. They selectively focus on the role of the mother’s education and on the maternal practices that are assumed to foster the development and deployment of EF skills. The mother is regarded as a teacher who provides the child with skills and practice in problem-solving that will generalize outside the home environment. Fathers are virtually ignored, and thus are not considered responsible for their children’s level of EF. Scant attention is paid to the nature of family structure, with its gendered and class-based arrangements, and the social oppression due to class or race that the family may be experiencing. In the EF research, the conceptual focus is mainly on the solitary individual. Typically, a researcher assesses a child working on a task alone in a laboratory setting. Given this perspective on influences on development, the nature of tasks, and individual performance, it is not surprising that as EF researchers began to explore the consequences of EF, they focused on individual adaptation and success in school, particularly in mathematics. Thus, Burman’s critique of developmental psychology’s abstract, universal, “normal” child is easily extended to biases in contemporary EF research.

By decontextualizing children, EF research has emphasized children’s management of internal resources. It is taken for granted that the external resources needed to reach goals are available to everyone, regardless of race, gender, or social class. Thus, the partner to the standardized child assessed by standardized instruments is a standardized environment where the resources needed to solve problems are easily available. It is assumed that environment is the one that is best for development, but little attention is paid to how particular environments may facilitate or impede the practice of EF skills, and whether accessibility to particular environments varies within the social structure. It also is assumed that EF leads to successful adaptation and development for all races, genders, and social classes, despite differences in their power and resources. Consequently, little is known about the role of diverse environments in the development of EF skills and conversely the role of EF skills in the daily lives of diverse children living in diverse environments.

The assumption of a biologically determined course of maturation, as well as the reductionism of traditional masculine Western science, salient in Burman’s critique, can be seen in the biological emphasis in EF research. EFs are believed to be centered on neural circuitry in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, and many studies report results from fMRI imagery of brain activities as well as from other imaging techniques (e.g. Wendelken, Munakata, Baym, Souza, & Bunge, 2012). Moreover, researchers search for genetic influences on EF (e.g. Friedman et al., 2008).

One implication of this normalizing is that it authorizes a fixed set of developmental milestones and then simultaneously pathologizes, and thus marginalizes, children who do not achieve these developmental milestones on a fixed schedule. These children often are from low-income families (Sarsour et al., 2011) or homeless families (Herbers et al., 2011), where different skills, strategies, and tasks may be needed for survival. Alternatively, they are children in clinical categories such as autism (Smithson et al., 2013) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; Langberg, Dvorsky, & Evans, 2013).

Perspective 2: Prototype of white, middle-class, European-American male

The ideal of achieving strong EF skills is based on the assumption that the most effective problem solver is one who is autonomous and in control. The choice of the term “executive” (even today, chief executive officers are predominantly male at higher levels in the business world) is informative. It places the competitive corporate model within the brain. Other terms could have been used, for example, “facilitating functions,” “coordinating functions,” or “integrating functions.” These alternatives imply collaboration and the empowering of others, activities emphasized by feminists (e.g. Surrey, 1991). Considering alternative terms suggests that the autonomous problem solver in control may not always be the best model for solving problems. Some problems are best solved by someone who can collaborate well with others to come to a common solution. Why emphasize EF, control, and solitary problem-solving rather than shared, integrated, coordinated participation with others? Today, even the business world, especially the computer industry, encourages collaborative innovation and problem-solving. The model of the autonomous worker may be outdated.

Consistent with the ideal masculine problem solver described by Burman, the focus in EF research is on speed, efficiency, and economy. Research looks at response time, at the increased efficiency of neural activation as it becomes more localized in the brain during development, and at “shift cost,” when children have trouble shifting attention (Huizinga, Dolan, van der Molden, & Maurits, 2006). Moreover, the prototypical Western male is competitive, focused on overcoming an opponent. Similarly, EF assessments, especially of inhibition, often involve conflict—between prepotent and correct responses, or between mind and body. EF encompasses the Western stereotype of masculinity in other ways as well, such as in the focus on the delay of gratification, the compartmentalization of rational from emotional functioning, and the deployment of rationality to control the body and emotions.

Consistent with the Western focus on progress, developmental changes in EF are seen as progressive: EF becomes more “mature” even though there simultaneously are losses as some neural synapses are pruned away when other brain pathways related to EF become stronger. Studies also chart the progressive developmental change from simple to complex EFs (e.g. Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008).

Perspective 3: Politically motivated interventions

It is clear from these analyses that EF is gendered in content. EF also valorizes privilege. However, access to executive status and the environments in which actors are autonomous and in control of themselves and others is constrained by one’s society, particularly one’s class, race, and gendered status within it.

Politics also enters EF research in another way. Burman suggests that by characterizing children as low in self-control, developmentalists position them as needing adult help in controlling themselves. This also justifies a focus on how adults influence children rather than on how children contribute to their own development. The latter approach empowers children.

The emphasis on self-control and the surge of research on the advantages of EF for school success may be part of a larger societal theme of maintaining the social order, of keeping children controlled in the classroom, and of medicating children with ADHD (and thus EF difficulties), especially as class sizes increase in public schools. Low socio-economic status (SES; Sarsour et al., 2011) and homeless children (Herbers et al., 2011), in particular, may be seen as needing interventions to improve their EF and thus their ability to function in school. The focus is on training children to have better EF, rather than on addressing children’s social conditions, classroom structures, and pedagogy so that various kinds of learners can thrive.

At a deeper level, the primacy of control reflects a modernist political and epistemological stance. The world is knowable, orderly, and predictable. Children should be brought up to learn that order and, in places where it does not yet exist, learn how to impose that order by conquering space, disease, and so on or by waging a war against poverty. This linkage, between the political and psychological, is rarely made by the laboratory experimental psychologist.

Using Burman’s critique to reconstruct the topic of EFs

After reading Burman’s critique, it is tempting to discard the study of development and EF as a biased and outmoded approach to knowledge about the world. But the infant is not the adult, scientific and computational modes of thought exist, and the mystery remains about the nature of change and even the nature of the mind that changes. Burman presents a challenge to those who want to know about the changing mind. A conservative approach inspired by Burman’s analysis would simply reinsert important factors that are missing from contemporary research. At a more radical level, Burman’s critique can be used to reconstruct the approach to cognitive development to reduce its hegemonic and hierarchical biases and provide accounts of development that are more inclusive and complete. In the following sections we suggest how research on EF might be transformed. Burman’s insights warrant a careful examination of the aspects of cognition that are tapped, the tasks that are used for measuring EF, and the role of human and contextual variations in acquiring and deploying EF.

The first approach is conservative because it leaves the concept of EF untouched but uses research on it to test and flesh out Burman’s critique. Let us take an overly simple example—EF research can be used to validate feminist critiques of the gendered nature of EF by reinserting the social context to explore how, where, and when gender exerts its influence. It can also explore the impact of diverse constructions of gender. EF research can be a test case for studying both the influence of gender roles on performance and the nature of EF as a situated cognitive skill. At the very least, there might be gender differences in performance on EF tasks in certain cultures and these differences might be associated with aspects of the child’s activities and environment (or even brain functioning) that tell us how particular gendered contexts exert their influences. Researchers might look for theoretically relevant differences in populations. For example, those with stronger gender norms, and gendered arrangements causing differences in power and resources, might show greater differences in performance. Analyses might examine the impact of larger social variables such as class, culture, and family structure on EF. Additional examination of these factors might focus on the impact of specific, theoretically relevant variables. Presumably, opportunities to engage in scientific/mathematical activities or the assignment of specific gendered home responsibilities are associated with variations in EF and gender differences. Tasks of planning, an EF, can be presented in different contexts with different gendered connotations, such as grocery shopping versus hunting. We know that different storylines for solving a planning task (the Tower of Hanoi; Klahr & Robinson, 1981) change the process of problem solution but there is no systematic manipulation of the nature of those stories to test the impact of specific arrangements of class, gender, or culture. By examining specific hypotheses about how aspects of gender or race or class affect specific tasks in specific contexts, a richer story of the role of social context in aspects of cognitive development in specific populations can emerge. The deconstruction of universals provides hints about the reconstruction of a field.

We now, however, go beyond this conservative approach and apply Burman’s critique to the EF concept itself. Often, the nature of the task determines the paradigm for development. EF tasks usually require a single solution and/or a single strategy for solution. Performance is easily quantified, with the best performance being faster or more efficient. The choice of tasks lends itself to categorizing performance as higher-level, better, and more mature. Abstract, rule-driven tasks lead to characterizing task performance as well as cognition and development in the same terms. Better performers are engaged in higher levels of thought or top-down processing. Note the hierarchical language.

A revisionist approach to cognitive development would widen its scope to include other aspects of problem-solving. EF is not the only cognitive skill or even the most effective in some situations. As Burman might attest, the construct of EF puts the modernist, “rationalist,” abstract thinker into the mind of the child. The predominant focus on EF, although productive, has led to the neglect of other aspects of problem-solving and to a narrowing of the range of cognitive tasks used to measure problem-solving. EF skills have been assessed in situations where they work well—when there is a single way of solving problems using relatively simple rules or algorithms that reliably determine success. EF skills are adaptive for learning basic arithmetic, for example. But few situations are that simple and other cognitive skills such as discovering novel outcomes or “brainstorming” may be more important in more complex or variable circumstances. EF skills comprise only one aspect of people’s cognitive repertoire and, in fact, much learning during childhood goes into discerning when, where, and how much the use of EF skills may be warranted. Thus, a Burman-inspired revisionist approach to EF would map other tasks simultaneously with EF and explore the linkages among task components, for example, the ability to shift attention and to generate new solutions.

The use of a broader range of tasks leads to questioning the notion of cognitive maturity. Consider some behaviors thought to indicate poor EF: proceeding without a plan; not inhibiting what one feels like doing; continuing on one’s current path rather than shifting to a different approach to a problem, and focusing attention on items considered irrelevant. These behaviors have value on some tasks or in some contexts. If control of one’s body and mental activities; and inhibition of one’s impulsive behaviors and thoughts, characterize EF, then improvisation could be considered the other end of the spectrum. Improvisation would include following intuitions and impulses, and looking at where that leads. Thus, the opposite of EF may be needed for creativity and for exploring broadly during learning. Improvisational skills also may be important for survival in the uncertain environments in which many children born into poverty live (see below).

Evidence that creativity, or “thinking outside of the box,” may be greater when there is less cognitive control comes from studies using direct (non-invasive) stimulation of particular brain areas to temporarily disengage cognitive control and thus allow more unfiltered information. In one study (Chrysikou et al., 2013), adults in the US looked at pictures of artifacts and had to generate either a common use (e.g. a tissue used to blow one’s nose) in one condition, or in another condition, an uncommon use (e.g. a tissue used to stuff a box). Decreased cognitive control, which presumably permitted more unfiltered information to be processed, benefitted performance in the uncommon-use condition but not the common-use condition. That is, reduced EF was associated with more creative responses. Similarly, in another study (German & Defeyter, 2000), investigators asked children aged five to seven in England to use common objects in atypical ways (e.g. emptying a box of tacks and using the box to hold a candle). Compared to older children, the younger children, who usually score lower on EF tasks, could more easily shift from considering the object’s typical use and were more able to generate effective solutions based on the object’s less salient perceptual features. That is, the children were less likely to show “functional fixedness” than were adults. Relatedly, Chrysikou et al. (2013) noted that in other research (Seeley et al., 2008), a 67-year-old woman with frontotemporal dementia, which may selectively affect areas of cognitive control, began to show visual artistic abilities that she did not possess before. Thus, whether cognitive control facilitates performance depends on the type of task. Cognitive control may be detrimental when creativity or more bottom-up rather than top-down processing is needed.

Consider another component of EF, cognitive shifting, as when a child first sorts objects according to color and then is asked to sort them according to shape. Young children find this switch difficult, and are said to show “perseveration” on color, implying a lack of flexibility or control. However, what is thought to show cognitive inflexibility actually could be advantageous for some tasks, and could be seen as “persistence.” When no single strategy reliably guarantees success, one may need to persist in adopting a strategy that will be successful irregularly. Or sometimes a new strategy must be practiced until it requires little effort before it can pay off. For example, a new, appropriate memory strategy such as verbally rehearsing items to be remembered or sorting them into categories is initially so effortful that it may not help a young child’s recall (Miller & Seier, 1994). However, persistence until the strategy is more practiced rather than switching to a less effortful, though poorer, strategy is advantageous in the long run. In addition, there are times when one intuits a solution to a problem and must persist in gathering the information that confirms it despite original failures. Cecilia Conrad, writing about recipients of MacArthur grants, notes that many of them have taken risks and persisted through failures to make something new or to find unexpected solutions to old problems (Conrad, 2013).

Similarly, good EF is thought to involve focusing attention on one aspect of a situation designated as “relevant” and inhibiting attention to those aspects of the situation designated as “irrelevant.” Such a skill is the embodiment of decontextualization. However, the focused attention in strong cognitive control may be detrimental because such singular focus masks understanding of the multiple social cues that define any task and performance on it, and occludes examination of the steps by which individuals become aware of the way their performance is situated, and learn to respond to those contextual cues. While strong cognitive control may be useful on abstract tasks, sensitivity to context is clearly advantageous on a wide range of social tasks. Successful persuasion, for example, depends on reading the audience and gauging one’s position with respect to them. Consistent with Burman’s assertions, it could be argued that all tasks, even those in the laboratory, position the child in a social context and the child’s sensitivity to that context contributes to the cognitive resources and strategies the child deploys. What is needed is a map of when diverse children deploy EF and when alternative skills and strategies are recruited. From Burman’s perspective, the particular contexts in which EF is useful may vary by gender and SES, because a child’s options in a particular context may depend on the constraints that accompany these social markers.

The value-laden nature of patterns of attention is revealed by cultural differences in the use of focused versus distributed attention. In one study, Mexican-American children in California tended to attend to several aspects of an instructional situation (Correa-Chávez, Rogoff, & Arauz, 2005). During classroom instruction in making a bird by folding paper, their attention skillfully simultaneously sampled both the teacher’s actions and those of other children. In contrast, the European-American children (and less traditional Mexican-American children from families with more education) tended to focus on the teacher’s actions. In a related finding, Japanese children from Kyoto showed more perceptual awareness and recall of contextual information in a visual scene than did US Caucasian-American children, who tended to focus on a central object (Imada, Carlson, & Itakura, 2013).

The definition of “good” EF performance reflects an adult bias in which high-scoring performance is considered a hallmark of maturity and expertise. Burman has argued that what is best for adults may not be best for children or for novices in a field. The prolonged low level of cognitive control in young children, purportedly linked to the slower development of the prefrontal cortex compared to other brain areas, may have more benefits than costs to young children (Thompson-Schill, Ramscar, & Chrysikou, 2009), and individuals at the beginning of learning a domain may benefit from using modes of thought that do not draw heavily on EF. That is, low cognitive control may benefit learning. For instance, during learning, especially learning aimed at flexible object use or language acquisition, it may be advantageous to attend to competing, potentially useful, information, rather than inhibit attention to it.

As another example of the value of lesser cognitive control, consider working memory, a core component of EF. Having a large working memory is thought to be advantageous because it permits individuals to hold in mind a large number of items and perform a mental operation on them, while updating the set of items as needed during problem-solving. However, young children, and novices in any field who are still trying to discover how the domain works, may initially find it advantageous to construct simple working hypotheses, and do limited updating. A learner may not be ready to assimilate complex working hypotheses. This may explain why children acquiring a first language and adults learning a second language focus on extracting the most frequent grammatical forms they hear (e.g. forming plurals by adding “s,” and thus saying “mouses”) rather than trying to deal with cognitively demanding irregular forms (e.g. mice) (Chrysikou, Novick, Trueswell, & Thompson-Schill, 2011). In reconstituting the study of EF, it might be beneficial to examine whether different levels of EF and different aspects of EF may be advantageous at different stages in the learning process, depending on the task. Thus, following Burman’s caution to question the assumptions of developmental research (in order to reveal an implicit value system) can lead to a broader understanding of the contributions and limitations of EF.

The preceding section discussed how, from Burman’s perspective, conventional developmental approaches may infantilize the child by highlighting tasks and settings requiring skills the child has yet to master rather than looking at the skills and tasks children master rapidly. Burman also notes how children are pathologized, whereas the field would benefit from focusing on a model of cognitive differences, not cognitive deficits. Societies need many kinds of thinkers to provide variable approaches to innovation. For example, children with conditions such as autism-spectrum disorder (at the high-functioning end) or mild ADHD have ways of thinking that differ from those of other children, but these differences are not necessarily deficits in and of themselves. In other words, difference may just be difference, not better or worse. A difference may become a deficit mainly in settings, such as schools, designed to fit the majority of children. Gernsbacher (2013) has identified a bias toward seeing the brains or behaviors of particular groups, such as people with autism, as a deficit rather than as part of the diversity of human thinking. She notes that whenever researchers document differences in brain structure or function in the brains of people with autism versus other people, they designate that of the former as abnormal, rather than simply different. Even when different studies have contradictory findings in their brain measures, researchers interpret whichever outcome is found in people with autism as abnormal. For example, both greater and lesser task-related brain activity in people with autism are interpreted as showing a deficiency. Gernsbacher (2007) argues that we should think about brain or behavioral differences as “neural diversity” rather than as normal versus deficient and we should determine where these differences are deployed in coping skills. Some children with autism exhibit outstanding artistic, musical, mathematical, or visual memory abilities, which may not require strong EF. This may reflect the atypical development of their prefrontal cortex, along with greater activity in occipital regions (e.g. Heaton, Ludlow, & Roberson, 2008; Snyder, 2009; referred to in Chrysikou et al., 2013).

Drawing on Burman’s critique of developmental psychology’s normative approach, we have shown that Burman’s research and theoretical strategy of moving away from a normative approach and focusing on the nature of behaviors and abilities that have been labeled as “less mature” or “abnormal” is a fruitful one. This approach will provide a more complete picture of cognitive development, open up new areas of inquiry, and reduce bias. More generally, by using human variation, one can obtain a better picture of what forces shape development, and even what development is.

Finally, based on Burman’s arguments, the concept of EF reflects the biases of the industrialized middle class. EF tasks assume a typical environment with ample, predictable, and accessible resources. Children with fewer resources, such as those living in poverty or in homeless families, may be honing an alternative set of problem-solving skills (e.g. Blair & Raver, 2012; Cutuli et al., 2013) that are adaptive in uncertain and unsafe environments. When the environment is characterized by uncertainty of resources, then persistence, attention to context, and improvisation may be more important skills than EF. These alternative skills may help low-SES and homeless children adapt to the demands of their environment and the possibilities for their future. For example, children in low-SES, stressed families have a more reactive and faster response to threats. That is, “because low-SES children are frequently exposed to life events that are uncontrollable and unpredictable, they come to view the world as a place that requires constant vigilance against threats and mistrust of others” (Miller & Chen, 2013, pp. 68–69; see also Chen, Langer, Raphaelson, & Matthews, 2004). Moreover, low-SES children may choose current certain resources over future uncertain resources. Although these tendencies may be labeled poor EF (particularly low inhibition and inability to delay gratification), they actually may be more relevant and advantageous in these children’s current, unsafe environment and unpredictable future (Blair & Raver, 2012).

As another example, one of the components of EF is planning, and typical laboratory tasks involve errand running or grocery shopping. A child is given a list of items and asked to map an efficient shopping route through a grocery store. This is not a gender-neutral environment because usually girls are tasked with shopping. The bias goes deeper. What if a child lives in an environment where there is no supermarket and where shops are not always stocked or the price of a desired item fluctuates unpredictably? The child must learn when to plan, and how to adapt plans, and when to abandon planning. Thus, planning is only one of a complex set of skills needed to achieve goals. The streetwise child may become very skilled in deploying strategies for assessing the viability of goals and multiple ways to achieve them in a changing and unpredictable environment. But these are not the kinds of task environments researchers build into the study of cognition even though these environments may be a major feature of the daily lives of many children. Why not study cognition in those environments?

Promising trends in recent EF research

Recent EF research shows promising signs of moving toward a perspective more compatible with Burman’s position. For example, in an encouraging move away from a strict focus on reason, EF research has expanded to include “hot” EF as well as “cold” EF. “Hot” cognition focuses on the emotional aspects of self-regulation, such as control of frustration when confronted with a difficult problem or rewarding oneself as crucial steps toward a goal are achieved. Perhaps a further step is exploring the motivation for task engagement.

Also promising is the recent work on how the social context contributes to the development of EF (though the research has focused almost exclusively on mothers, again assuming mothers’ responsibility for their children’s development rather than considering a range of caretaker influences). For example, in one study, middle-class Canadian toddlers showed more advanced EF if, during infancy, their mothers had demonstrated sensitivity to their child’s needs, included references to the mind when talking to their child, and, especially, supported their child’s autonomy (Bernier, Carlson, & Whipple, 2010). This less reductionist work shows that EF is due to more than simply brain development. However the field has yet to push its analyses of the social context to explore whether the particular gendered, classed, and racialized power arrangements children inhabit play a role in the tools the child might gain access to or exercise.

Developmental psychology has tended to focus on majority groups and then to consider diversity. However, there are some promising signs that developmentalists are recognizing that starting with, rather than ending with, diversity can be fruitful. For example, the strong EF skills and academic success of some homeless children, despite the odds against them, has stimulated work on identifying the contributors to resilience in children (e.g. Cutuli et al., 2013). Another example is the documented relationship between bilingualism and higher EF (e.g. Barac & Bialystok, 2012). This demonstrates a possible cognitive advantage in immigrant children. A focus on diversity can help researchers identify important mechanisms underlying the development of EF that were not apparent when only the majority, monolingual population was studied.

Conclusions

In this retrospective, we drew on Burman’s insights to focus on three perspectives on EF research. First, exploring the context for development is essential for understanding development. Like any skill, EF skills are deployed in a context and children must learn whether and how to fit EF skills to each environment. It could be argued that possessing EF skills is the outcome of inhabiting a position of privilege. By creating a map of the difficulties that hinder deployment of EF or the props that foster its deployment, the researcher may better understand the nature of these skills and their social construction. For example, care-givers who are sensitive in calibrating their input to children in cognitive tasks may be teaching children to calibrate or monitor their own behavior, cognitively and emotionally (Liew, 2012; Friedman, Scholnick et al., 2014; Zhou, Chen & Main, 2012). But these individuals are often highly educated and middle class, with expectations of a responsive environment. Research also neglects the influence of diverse family structures.

The second perspective focuses on diversity in populations studied and in cognitive abilities tapped. EF skills serve as a model for solitary, highly cognitively motivated problem-solving in a fixed, well-defined problem space. EF skills may be less relevant when children encounter other environments which may require application of other skills. EF skills do not exist in a vacuum. Much is to be learned from examining how other skills in the individual’s toolkit complement, supplement, or hinder the exercise or acquisition of strong EF. We argue that Burman’s critique raises questions to be answered, rather than identifies a field to be abandoned. The critique sets the agenda for constructing a rich and variegated view of development which takes into account different social structures and social positions.

Third, that rich, variegated view of development may widen the perspective on Burman’s assertion that political frameworks constrain our views of development. Any theory that claims development is a product of social influences inevitably implies a view of the social that extends beyond the family to the nature of the political structure (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). The challenge is to go beyond the rhetoric, to explore how specific beliefs, practices, and daily experiences create different skills or levels of skill over the life course. In effect, Burman’s critical analysis calls not merely for unraveling the “single skein” developmental approach, but also for weaving it into a tapestry.

Footnotes

Author biographies

Patricia H Miller is Professor of Psychology at San Francisco State University. Her research area is developmental psychology, especially cognitive development during childhood. Topics include executive function, learning strategies, impact of exercise on cognition, and contributions of gesturing to cognitive development. A former Director of Women’s Studies, her theoretical interests include implications of feminist epistemologies for theorizing cognitive development. She has an edited book, with Ellin Scholnick, Towards a Feminist Developmental Psychology.

Ellin K Scholnick is Professor Emeritus in Psychology and Faculty Ombudsman at the University of Maryland. She is Chair of the President’s Commission on Women’s Issues at the University of Maryland and has worked on the development of family friendly policies and the delivery of workshops targeting women contemplating promotion. She has also written about feminist epistemological approaches to developmental psychology.

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