Executive Functions

This chapter shows that key higher-level cognitive functions known as the executive functions are strongly associated with the human prefrontal cortex (HPFC). It argues that an important way to understand the functions of the HPFC is to adapt the representational model that has been the predominant approach to understanding the neuropsychological aspects of, for example, language processing and object recognition. The representational approach developed is based on the structured event complex framework. This framework claims that there are multiple subcomponents of higher-level knowledge that are stored throughout the HPFC as distinctive domains of memory. The chapter also argues that there are topographical distinctions in where these different aspects of knowledge are stored in the HPFC.