Executive function — top-down processes by which the human mind controls behavior, regulating thoughts and actions — have long been studied using a standard set of tools, with these assessments being included in national and international child development norms.

A new study of children in schooled and unschooled environments, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, raises questions about some of the assumptions underlying the way psychologists and scholars of cognitive science think about these processes.

Instead of defining an innate, basic feature of human cognition, the executive functions supposedly captured in the assessments are likelier to depend on the influence of formal schooling.

The study, “The cultural construction of ‘executive function,’” tested children in the Kunene region of Africa, which spans the countries of Namibia and Angola, as well as children in the U.K. and Bolivia. Children in rural areas of Kunene who received limited or no formal schooling differed profoundly in so-called executive function testing from their schooled peers, or a “typical” Western schooled sample.

“Almost all developmental research is done on children who live in a schooled world,” explained Joseph Henrich, Ruth Moore Professor of Evolutionary Biology, whose Culture, Cognition, and Culture lab in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology oversaw the study. Referring to Kunene, he said, “We went to a place where we have a kind of natural experiment, where we have some communities with no schools and some with schools. That allows us to compare the cognitive development of the kids. And what we see is we only get the usual executive function development in the places with schools rather than in the places without. That suggests that it’s really about schooling.

“What has been taken as a very generalized thing called ‘executive function’ is actually really specific to a set of skills you need to navigate school and schooled worlds.”

Testing executive function, continued Henrich, often involves such exercises as memorizing lists of unconnected words. But children with little or no formal schooling might not recognize these words because such lists do not occur in their environment.

However, the researchers argued, the innate cognitive functions of children who were not formally schooled were not impaired — they were simply applied differently.

“In the populations we work in, people are super good at remembering cows,” he said. “They can look at the herd, they can tell you how many cows are there, they can name the cows. If you showed them faces of cows, they can tell you who the owner is. And I bet if I did this with kids around here in Boston, they would be terrible at differentiating cows.”

It’s not that executive function doesn’t exist, explained the researchers. Instead, we need to recognize that what we have been measuring is not that overall control.

“We need to rethink how we approach human psychology,” said Henrich, and a lot of what is regarded as regular cognitive development is actually a product of a formal education.

Ivan Kroupin, the paper’s lead author and a former postdoc in Henrich’s lab, elaborated: “The term ‘executive function’ refers to a set of capacities and dispositions that are, in large part, culture-specific.” Kroupin, who is currently at the London School of Economics and co-directed the field studies with Helen Elizabeth Davis of Arizona State University, said, “ Our study suggests that the capacities these tasks require are in part universal, but also in part culture-specific, potentially tied to formal schooling or other institutions and experiences in urbanized societies.”

The findings suggest a re-examination of terms such as “executive functions” and a more accurate understanding of what these are.

“We can use the term ‘executive functions’ to refer to underlying universal capacities,” said Kroupin. However, “If that is the case then we need a different term for the suite of universal and culture-specific capacities which typical EF tasks are measuring.”