THE DEVELOPMENT OF EXECUTIVE FUNCTION IN EARLY ...

the DCCS because of too little inhibition, the current account suggests that children perform poorly in part
because of too much inhibition. In the Negative Priming version of the DCCS, children evidently have difficulty
disinhibiting the postswitch rules.
The task dynamics of increasing activation and inhibition explain why 3-year-old children fail in the DCCS, but
they do not explain why children pass. According to the CCC theory children pass the DCCS because the
development of reflection and higher order rule use allows them to control their behavior in a relatively topdown
fashion, so that this behavior is not determined associatively by task dynamics and the relative activation
levels of pre- and postswitch rules. Higher order rules allow children to select inhibited postswitch rules against
activated preswitch rules, just as an adult would switch flexibly on the DCCS even after (say) 100 preswitch
trials (although there may well be a cost in reaction time). Higher order rules are likely represented in a
linguistic format (e.g., Emerson & Miyake, 2003; Goschke, 2000; Luria, 1961; Vygotsky, 1962), and this
emphasis on higher order rule use underscores the important role that language plays in the flexible, top-down
control of behavior. Research with brain-injured adults also suggests that language plays an important role in
flexible task switching (Mecklinger, von-Cramon, Springer, & Matthes-von Cramon, 1999). Furthermore, there
is evidence of significant correlations between performance on the DCCS and verbal ability (Lang & Perner,
2002; Perner, Lang, & Kloo, 2002). Clearly, however, the precise role of language in the development of
executive function deserves more empirical attention.
Taking Intentionality Seriously
The CCC theory suggests that (a) executive function corresponds to goal-directed problem solving (i.e., it is a
function, not a mechanism), (b) children accomplish executive function by formulating rules in potentially silent
self-directed speech, and (c) there are age-related constraints on the complexity of the rules that children are
able to formulate and use. This approach makes specific, testable hypotheses regarding the psychological
structures that underlie children's behavior in different situations and at different ages, and makes specific
predictions about the circumstances in which children at different ages will exhibit failures of executive
function.
An important implication of CCC theory, with its emphasis on goal-directed processing and the way in which
children construe particular problems, is that executive function is closely tied to intentionality (Frye, 1999;
Frye & Zelazo, 2003). Intentionality is a complex concept that is often traced back to Brentano's (1973) book,
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (published in German in 1874)although its history is longer still.
Brentano used the notion of intentionality to mark the difference between mind (which he considered to be
coextensive with consciousness) and matter. For Brentano, "intentionality," from the Latin intendere (meaning
"to stretch," as in an archer's bow), or "mental in-existence" captured the fact that any conscious experience, no
matter how minimal, is an experience of something it has content existing in it, and it aims at or is directed
toward that content, whether that content is simple pain or pleasure, or something more complex, such as a
desire or a belief. The same cannot be said of things that are merely physical. Brentano's intentionality can thus
be viewed as a ground-level characteristic of consciousness, which any adequate psychological theory or
philosophy of mind will need to address.
In contrast to this philosophical sense, the term "intentionality" is also used in an everyday sense to mean
"purposeful" or "goal-directed." We talk about doing something intentionally, and we mean doing it in a goaldirected
fashion, doing it purposefully, or doing it deliberately. The everyday sense of intentionality is closely
related to Brentano's sense, both etymologically and conceptually, because intentional actions are directed at
goals in the same way that mental states are directed at their objects (i.e., what they are of; see Crane, 1998, for
a discussion of common misunderstandings of Brentano's notion of intentionality). Moreover, the two senses
are definitionally dependent because, for many authors, intentional action is goal-directed behavior that is
accompanied by (or motivated by) a particular type of intentional statenamely, an intention (e.g., Adams, 1986).