This Special Issue, comprising eight articles, focusses on two central cognitive functions that are affected in many intellectual disabilities: memory and executive functioning. Both are crucial for everyday life: Learning new skills, recalling facts, relating to past events, and having a unique representation of one’s individual’s past all depend on different forms of memory. More recently, executive functions have become a target in research on intellectual disabilities. Executive functions are required when novel situations arise and previously learned behavioral responses are not sufficient or not available. They are involved in prioritizing attention, solving problems, multi-tasking, planning for the future, forming decisions and help us to inhibit undesirable actions and adapt our behavior to the requirements of the respective situation. Thus, executive functions are crucial for self-organized behavior and management of most everyday challenges in one’s personal, social and occupational life.
In this context, the current special issue presents cutting-edge research on several domains of memory (e.g., working memory, contextual memory) and executive control (e.g., inhibition, effortful control, shifting) in a variety of intellectual disabilities, associated syndromes and populations at risk for cognitive impairments (e.g. autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), pre-term born children, individuals with selective language impairments); in addition, identifying an emerging research area in clinical and cognitive neuroscience it includes studies that target the interplay of both cognitive systems in complex cognition (e.g. so-called prospective memory) and demonstrate how executive functions and memory interact or how this interaction may be compromised in specific developmental and intellectual disabilities.
Specifically, Voigt and colleagues focus on the effects of neonatal stress on executive functioning in pre-term born toddlers as a population at risk for developing cognitive impairments across their development. Cuperus and colleagues explore executive functioning in children with specific language impairments. Sinzig et al. and Geurts and colleagues compare executive functioning in autism and ADHD, and Willfors et al. addressed the influence of non-shared environmental factors on executive deficits in ADHD by comparing monozygotic twin pairs. Kretschmer et al. addresses possible relations between moral reasoning, theory of mind and executive control in autism. The last two papers focus on the interplay of memory and executive functioning; with Kerns and colleagues looking at contextual memory in ADHD, and Altgassen and Koch looking at prospective memory in autism.
As the reader may now appreciate, this special issue has a strong interdisciplinary spirit and includes not only several distinct populations but also covers the variety of state-of-the-art methodologies (e.g., neuropsychological tests, experimental paradigms, genetics etc.) and present the most important theoretical angles currently being discussed. Finally, in terms of research groups, this special issue is truly international as leading researchers from Canada and several countries across Europe (e.g., Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland) have contributed their recent research findings. Thus, the contributions of this special issue reflect the potential variety of approaches in this field in line with the joint focus of cognitive mechanisms underlying impairments in memory and/or executive control in developmental disabilities. We therefore hope that it will attract the interest of a large body of readership both from the clinical and the experimental field and stimulate further discussions, research projects and ultimately clinical translation of neuroscientific models and empirical findings in the area of memory and executive control.
Guest Editors: The role of Executive Functions and Memory in Intellectual Disabilities
The editors would like to thank the guest editors Mareike Altgassen and Matthias Kliegel for their hard work and commitment in bringing this second special issue of the International Journal of Developmental Disabilities to fruition. Executive functions and memory are extremely important, particularly in those with intellectual disabilities, and this issue makes major contributions to this area of research.
Arturo Langa and Brian Salmons