How Executive Function Training Improves Your Cognitive Function

It’s easy to be concerned when your child has issues with reading comprehension, completing tasks, problem solving, and/or focusing. Whether it’s because of a learning disability or cognitive impairment, you may struggle to get your child to pay attention in school, complete their homework, or even express their emotions. 

The good news is there’s a way to help strengthen your child’s cognitive function so they can increase their learning capabilities, memory, and ability to pay attention. Executive function training enhances how the brain functions to improve a variety of cognitive skills in both children and adults.

At Abbey Neurodynamic Center, our team of neurologists can help children of all ages improve their ability to learn, and enhance overall brain function with executive function training. 

What can executive function training help with?

Executive function training is used to improve many cognitive functions. These include cognitive skills like memory, attention, spatial relations, and processing speed focus. By increasing brain function and cognitive abilities, executive function training can enhance your child’s skills in:

• Problem solving 
• Written language 
• Math 
• Reading comprehension 
• Creative thinking 

The treatment can even help enhance the ability to focus for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or attention deficit disorder (ADD).

How executive function training works 

Executive function training is grounded in neuroscience. The brain areas associated with your cognitive functions are mostly located in your prefrontal cortex, while the neural circuits that support these functions involve many areas of your brain.

These areas all work together to help you solve problems, reason, and engage in many other cognitive functions. Much of this connectivity develops over time and is based on your experiences. So, the more you engage in certain behaviors, like solving math problems or doing crossword puzzles, the more your cognitive functioning in certain areas is shaped and strengthened. With executive function training, we help improve cognitive function skills by strengthening the neural circuitry that underlies them.

For example, focusing on exercises that enhance working memory for 45 minutes a day for a period of 6-8 weeks has been shown to increase the capacity of working memory and show positive changes in brain activity and structure related to working memory.

What does executive function training look like? 

We develop individualized executive function training plans based on your child’s baseline learning ability and behavior patterns. Our plans include a variety of exercises that encourage development in whichever areas your child’s skills are lacking.

Some of the activities we may use include:

• Role playing activities
• Shared storytelling
• Matching and sorting games
• Games that require attention and strategy
• Puzzles
• Writing in a journal
• Computer-based game

Plans are amended as their cognitive skills grow. How often your child participates in each activity in their executive function training varies based on their individualized plan and skills. 

To find out more about how executive function training can improve your cognitive function, call our office in Palo Alto, California at 650-210-7922, or send us a message online today.