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Related Experiment Video

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Multimodal Protocol for Assessing Metacognition and Self-Regulation in Adults with Learning Difficulties

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Published on: September 27, 2020

Executive functions in individuals with intellectual disability.

Henrik Danielsson¹, Lucy Henry, Jerker Rönnberg

¹The Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping, Sweden. henrik.danielsson@liu.se

Research in Developmental Disabilities

|August 24, 2010

Summary

Adults with intellectual disability (ID) show executive function impairments, particularly in verbal fluency and dual-task word recall encoding. Longitudinal study reveals no significant changes over five years, suggesting specific working memory and processing speed deficits.

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Area of Science:

Neuropsychology
Developmental Psychology
Cognitive Science

Background:

Executive functions are crucial for daily living and are often impacted in intellectual disability (ID).
Longitudinal studies on executive functions in adults with ID are limited, hindering understanding of their cognitive development over time.
Assessing executive functions requires diverse tasks to capture different cognitive components.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate executive functions in adults with intellectual disability (ID) over a 5-year period.
To compare the longitudinal executive function performance of adults with ID to a matched control group.
To identify specific executive function deficits in adults with ID.

Main Methods:

A longitudinal study design over 5 years using the Betula database.
Inclusion of adults with intellectual disability (n=46) and a matched control group (n=92).
Assessment of executive functions using The Tower of Hanoi, dual-task word recall, and verbal fluency tasks on two occasions.

Main Results:

Adults with ID exhibited significant impairments in verbal fluency and during the encoding phase of a dual-task word recall.
No significant group differences were observed in The Tower of Hanoi task.
No significant changes in executive function performance were found between the two testing occasions over the 5-year period.

Conclusions:

Individuals with ID experience difficulties with lexical access speed and working memory executive control during encoding, including task shifting.
Executive function deficits in ID may not necessarily involve inhibition, but rather challenges with processing speed and working memory.
Adults with ID are more susceptible to strategy interruptions during encoding but show less impact from divided attention during recall.