Development of executive function

执行功能；例如，涉及意识控制思想和行动的心理过程)在童年时期经历了相当大的发展，现在有证据表明，EF的发展在一定程度上取决于表现越来越复杂的规则集的能力——孩子们首先获得了表现单一规则的能力，然后是一对规则，然后是一个规则的等级系统，允许他们在不相容的规则对中进行选择（Zelazo等人，2003）。虽然前额皮质（PFC）在EF中起着重要的作用，但对于PFC的特定发育变化与儿童EF的特定变化之间的关系，我们知之甚少。目前的提案描述了一条新的研究路线，旨在评估EF发展的神经相关性，特别关注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——从眼窝前额皮质（当刺激-奖励关联需要逆转时的单一反应规则），到腹侧和背侧PFC（条件规则集），到侧边PFC（在任务集之间进行选择的高阶规则）。主要的行为测量将是维度变化卡排序的版本（DCCS； Zelazo等人，2003）。两种主要的神经功能测量方法将被使用，并在可能的情况下进行重叠评估：事件相关功能磁共振成像（fMRI）和密集阵列（128通道）EEG/ERP。EEG/ERP具有毫秒级的时间分辨率，是捕获神经处理时间过程的理想方法。该研究项目的结果有可能揭示PFC年龄相关变化的功能意义，也将解决儿童早期经历对EF发展的影响。从长远来看，研究结果将为跨行为、认知/情感和神经层面分析的EF详细、综合描述提供基础。其中一个应用将是为患有EF相关疾病的儿童（如ADHD、自闭症、CD、PKU）开发干预措施。

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).