Are executive functions immutable?

This third session of the "Paris IAS Ideas" talk series will focus on the improvement of higher cognitive functions, and will be presented by Virginia Valian, Hunter College, City University of New York / CUNY Center.

This talk will take place at 3:00 PM Paris time | 9:00 AM New York | 2:00 PM London | 6:30 PM Delhi | 9:00 PM Beijing | 10:00 PM Tokyo, in English and online on Zoom, with previous registration there: http://bit.ly/IASIdeas

Presentation

Can adults improve their higher cognitive functions? For example, might speaking more than one language lead to improving in resolving conflicting stimuli or switching from one task to another? Some experiments suggest that managing two languages has wide cognitive benefits, while other experiments find no benefits for higher cognitive functions (sometimes called executive functions). Perhaps it is not possible to improve higher cognition, but only to improve how it is applied.

Replay