Within executive functions we find different processes that are essential in our daily lives:
- Working memory: the ability to temporarily store and process information. It is a space in which specific information is available for manipulation and transformation during a particular period of time.
- Planning: the ability to set goals, develop action plans to achieve them and choose the most appropriate one based on anticipating consequences.
- Reasoning: the faculty that allows us to consciously solve problems of all kinds by establishing causal relationships between them.
- Flexibility: the ability to make changes to something that was already planned, adapting to the circumstances around us.
- Inhibition: the ability to ignore impulses or irrelevant information, both internal and external, while performing a task.
- Decision making: the process of choosing between several alternatives according to our needs, weighing the results and consequences of all the options.
- Time estimation: the ability to roughly calculate the passage of time and the duration of an event or activity.
- Dual tasking: the ability to perform two tasks at the same time (these tasks must be of a different type), paying constant attention to both.
- Branching (multitasking): the ability to organize and optimally perform tasks simultaneously, alternating between them and knowing at every moment where each one stands.
What are executive functions for?
In our daily lives we need executive functions to get by in our environment and achieve our goals. They are essential, for example, when we plan our day after getting up in the morning, thinking about what we have to do, in what order, how long each thing and getting from one place to another will take us, and even whether we have to change the plan on the fly if something unexpected happens or we need to do a new task we were not counting on.
NeuronUP exercises to rehabilitate executive functions
To work on working memory, one of our exercises involves ordering a sequence of moving numbers, which becomes much harder the more numbers appear.
A very useful task for working on reasoning involves matching everyday concepts according to the category they belong to.
For the rehabilitation of planning, one of the activities most used by our users is undoubtedly Ordering the steps of activities, which has both a picture version and a text-only version.
