Development of executive function

执行功能（EF;即，参与有意识地控制思想和行动的心理过程）在儿童时期经历了相当大的发展，现在有证据表明，EF的发展部分取决于不断增长的表示越来越复杂的规则集的能力-儿童首先获得表示单个规则的能力，然后是一对规则，然后是允许他们在不兼容的规则对中进行选择的规则的分层系统（Zelazo等人，2003年）。虽然很明显，前额叶皮层（PFC）在EF中起着重要的作用，相对知之甚少，如何在PFC的具体发展变化与儿童的EF的具体变化。目前的建议描述了一个新的研究路线，旨在评估EF发展的神经相关性，特别是关注PFC的作用。假设规则使用的发展变化模式反映了PFC内特定区域的不同发展速度-从眶额皮质（当刺激-奖赏关联需要逆转时，反应的单一规则），腹外侧和背外侧PFC（条件规则集），以rostrolateral PFC（高阶规则之间的选择任务集）。主要的行为测量将是尺寸变化卡分类的版本（DCCS; Zelazo等人，2003年）。将使用两种主要的神经功能测量方法，可能时进行重叠评估：事件相关功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）和密集阵列（128通道）EEG/ERP。EEG/ERP具有毫秒级的时间分辨率，非常适合捕捉神经处理的时间过程。这项研究计划的结果有可能揭示PFC中与年龄相关的变化的功能意义，他们也将解决经验对幼儿期EF发展的影响。从长远来看，这些结果将为EF的详细综合解释提供基础，涵盖行为，认知/情感和神经水平的分析。一个应用将是为患有EF相关疾病的儿童制定干预措施（例如，ADHD、自闭症、CD、PKU）。

Executive function (EF; i.e., psychological processes involved in the conscious control of thought and action) undergoes considerable development during childhood, and there is now evidence that the development of EF depends, in part, on a growing ability to represent increasingly complex sets of rules--children first acquire the ability to represent a single rule, then a pair of rules, and then a hierarchical system of rules that allows them to select among incompatible pairs of rules (Zelazo et al., 2003). Although it is clear that prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays an important role in EF, relatively little is known about how specific developmental changes in PFC are related to specific changes in children's EF. The current proposal describes a new line of research that aims to assess the neural correlates of EF development, focusing in particular on the role of PFC. It is hypothesized that the pattern of developmental changes in rule use reflects the different rates of development of specific regions within PFC--from orbitofrontal cortex (single rules for responding when stimulus-reward associations need to be reversed), to ventrolateral and dorsolateral PFC (sets of conditional rules), to rostrolateral PFC (higher-order rules for selecting among task sets). Primary behavioral measures will be versions of the dimensional change card sort (DCCS; Zelazo et al., 2003). Two main measures of neural function will be used, with overlapping assessments when possible: event-related functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and dense-array (128-channel) EEG/ERP. EEG/ERP has millisecond temporal resolution and is ideal for capturing the time course of neural processing. The results of this research program have the potential to shed light on the functional significance of age-related changes in PFC, and they will also address the effect of experience on EF development during early childhood. In the long-term, the results will provide the foundation of a detailed, integrative account of EF that spans behavioral, cognitive/emotional, and neural levels of analysis. One application will be to develop interventions for children with disorders related to EF (e.g., ADHD, autism, CD, PKU).