Executive Functioning in Context: Measurement, Etiology, and Biological Embedding

Abstract

Executive functioning abilities measured early in life are known to predict important outcomes later in life, including academic outcomes, physical health, and symptoms of psychopathology. Unfortunately, a growing literature identifies a consistent relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage in childhood and worse executive functioning performance, and the mechanisms underlying this troubling relationship are not well understood. This dissertation is comprised of three studies that address several complications muddying our understanding of executive functioning and its relationship with disadvantage, including (1) how we measure executive functioning, (2) how we can disentangle non-genetic from genetic effects of parenting on executive functioning, and (3) how multiple levels of context may become biologically embedded to affect executive functioning. In Study 1, we find encouraging evidence for a novel computational measure of task-general executive functioning, Efficiency of Evidence Accumulation (EEA), as a transdiagnostic risk factor associated with externalizing psychopathology in adolescents. In Study 2, we employ a genetically informed design, find little evidence of passive or evocative genotype-environment correlation, and instead finding that the relationship between harsh parenting and child executive functioning is due in part to non-shared environmental influences. In Study 3, we find that neighborhood poverty is associated with executive functioning performance via inferior frontal gyrus activation during a go/no-go task, over and above other contextual effects. However, we do not find evidence for nurturing, supportive parenting as a buffer, nor for harsh parenting as an activator of neighborhood risk. The general discussion chapter of this dissertation highlights the implications of this research and important future directions.