Frontal lobe function in childhood and adolescence: A heuristic for assessing attention regulation, executive control, and the intentional states important for social discourse

Abstract

A heuristic for assessing frontal lobe function in children and adolescents is described. Information presents to an input operator, which is regulated by the operations of orientation, anticipatory set, and interference control. Working memory then represents information as one of three symbol‐level systems that collectively form the knowledge base: mental models (images or more abstract representations of information whose structure corresponds to the structure of the situation they describe), semantic representations (propositions concerned with meaning), and intentional representations (propositions concerned with the knowledge and beliefs that people entertain about themselves and about each other). Knowledge base systems may undergo further elaboration or metarepresentation, becoming integrated with habits or procedures and with declarative forms of knowledge; they are also involved in monitoring the match between internal states and the external world. The heuristic helps assess and explain some observed deficits in the frontal lobe functions of attention regulation, executive control, and the intentional states important for social discourse.