THE DIVERSITY OF EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS IN NORMAL ADULTS:A LATENT VARIABLE ANALYSIS
执行功能可分离性及与年龄关系的潜变量分析

The diversity of three executive functions (inhibition of prepotent responses, memory updating, and attention switching) was studied with latent variable approach. One hundred and forty-two adults between 18 and 85 years of age performed nine computerized tasks that are considered to tap each corresponding target executive function. The results indicated that 1). Reliabilities of those tasks are relatively high. 2) Confirmatory factor analysis showed that nine executive function tasks have strong loading on the hypothesized constructs, indicating a good convergent validity of the three executive functions, and the correlations between the three executive functions are rather low when age are controlled, indicating a good discriminant validity of the three executive functions. Altogether, these results were better than those of Miyake et al. (2000), and provided a strong evidence for the diversity of executive functions.