ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of adolescent brain development and its implications for the development of executive functions. The development of working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility will be described separately, as well as their neural underpinnings, trainability and relevance for school settings. A possible way in which low working memory may have consequences for school learning is that it constitutes a bottleneck which limits the amount of information that children can keep in mind, ultimately impacting upon school learning. Aside from these results demonstrating that individual differences in working memory performance are related to academic achievement, there is also evidence for a general increase in working memory skills from childhood into adulthood. The children in the adaptive group showed larger gains in performance on a near-transfer tasks, and in addition showed far transfer to improvements in general reading ability.
