Executive functions are complex cognitive processes necessary for planning, organizing, guiding, revising, regulating, and evaluating behavior necessary to adapt effectively to the environment and to achieve goals (Bauermeister, 2008).
Executive functioning involves abilities and processes vital for daily life such as:
In our daily life we need executive functioning to navigate our environment and to achieve our goals. For example, executive functions are crucial to planning the day when we wake up in the morning: we think about what has to be done, in which order, how long it will take us, etc. Executive functions are necessary when we have to modify plans on the go due to unforeseen events, or in case some new task we were not expecting needs performing.
To enhance working memory, one of the activities we have consists of ordering a sequence of moving numbers, which becomes more difficult as more numbers are added.
To improve reasoning, a very useful task involves matching common everyday concepts to the category to which they belong.
For the rehabilitation of planning, one of the most commonly used activities by our users is “Ordering the steps of a task”, which has both picture-only and a text-only version.