A recent PNAS article by Kroupin and colleagues challenges one of the most widely assumed constructs in cognitive science: that “executive function” (EF) reflects a universal set of cognitive control capacities. Their data suggest something more unsettling—that what psychologists have been measuring for decades as EF may be, to a substantial degree, a culturally constructed skill set tied to life in what they call “schooled worlds.”
The core of their argument is empirical. Standard EF tasks—card sorting, backward digit span, rule switching—require manipulating arbitrary, decontextualized information. These are precisely the kinds of operations heavily trained in formal schooling but far less demanded in many traditional environments. When these tasks are administered across populations, the differences are not subtle. Children in industrialized, schooled contexts show the familiar developmental trajectory—successful rule switching by age five, increasing working memory span, and so on. But children in rural, nonschooled communities often show qualitatively different patterns: failure to switch rules even at older ages, difficulty performing backward recall, and generally low rates of what researchers define as “canonical” responses. The point is not that these children lack cognitive control in any meaningful sense—they function effectively in complex real-world environments—but that the tasks are measuring a particular style of cognition that develops under specific cultural conditions.
This forces an uncomfortable ambiguity. The term “executive function” has been used to refer both to presumed universal regulatory capacities and to performance on these standard tasks. But the two may not coincide. Either EF names a universal capacity that current tasks fail to measure cleanly, or it names a culturally specific set of skills cultivated by schooling. The data do not allow both interpretations simultaneously. The implication is that decades of developmental curves, policy recommendations, and even clinical assessments may rest on a construct that conflates biology with cultural training.
A brief commentary by Mazzaferro and colleagues pushes back—not against the data, but against the conclusion that we must choose between universality and cultural specificity. They argue that the problem lies in measurement, not in the concept itself. Psychological tests always mix construct-relevant variance with context-dependent artifacts. When a task is transplanted into a different cultural setting without adaptation, it may cease to measure the intended construct at all. The analogy they offer is instructive: one would not conclude that “theory of mind” is culturally specific simply because a Western-designed false-belief task fails in an unfamiliar cultural context. Instead, one adapts the task.
From this perspective, executive function may indeed be a broadly shared capacity—rooted in evolutionary history and observable across species—but its expression and measurement are inevitably shaped by local demands. The solution is not to abandon the construct, but to develop context-sensitive assessments that capture how cognitive control is actually deployed in different environments. A child in a Western classroom uses executive function to manipulate symbols and follow abstract rules; a child in a pastoral society uses it to track livestock, navigate terrain, and manage social responsibilities. The underlying capacities may overlap, but the skills—and the tests that reveal them—do not.
What emerges from this exchange is a deeper point about cognitive science itself. Constructs like executive function are not simply discovered; they are stabilized through particular experimental practices. When those practices are narrowly tied to a single cultural niche, the resulting constructs risk inheriting that narrowness while being mislabeled as universal. The Kroupin study exposes this risk sharply. The Mazzaferro commentary reminds us that abandoning the construct is not the only response—but that rescuing it requires rethinking how and where we measure it.
The broader implication is that cognition cannot be cleanly separated from the environments in which it develops. What looks like a general-purpose cognitive capacity from within one cultural setting may, from a wider perspective, be an adaptation to a specific set of tasks and constraints. The challenge going forward is not simply to refine our measures, but to build theories that explicitly link cognitive processes to the ecological and cultural niches in which they are embedded.
[NOTE: This post was generated by ChatGPT and curated by Deric]
