Dr. Mark D'Esposito

And if you don't have your frontal lobes, it doesn't get pulled up properly.

Absolutely.

I mean, definitely you can learn strategies to not only sort of learn rules, but how to apply goals.

When you start to think about that task in particular, some of it has to do with sort of maintaining a goal and maintaining a goal at different, you know, time scales, right?

And children tend to sort of act on goals that are much more short, on a shorter time scale.

You know, I'm going to have the sandwich right now because I'm hungry, as opposed to wait till

till dinner, which is a longer term goal.

And so, yeah, this default to sort of the short, you can learn that maintaining a longer type goal can be much more beneficial than the short term goal, even though it doesn't seem obvious.

And we all learn that, right?

As we get older.

Most of us.

We keep our eye on the ball of sort of more long-term goals, and that's very predictive of how successful we can be.

The farther out we can maintain a goal.

And that's what the prefrontal cortex does.

It maintains goals and then applies those goals.

And if you don't apply them, then all of this executive function breaks down.

Yeah, I mean, it absolutely can generalize.

That's been a frustrating thing, trying to develop what we call cognitive therapy, where we teach, we try to improve someone's memory ability, or we try to improve someone's executive function ability.

The disappointing early results was always that, yeah, they get very good at the tasks that you've trained them at.

but it doesn't seem to generalize to anything else.