21-25 But in consensus meetings and reviews of factor analytic studies it was determined

that the term “reasoning and problem solving” had the “advantage of distinguishing this domain from working memory.” 26 Armed with these revised concept labels the team identified tests to measure this construct, but some tests upon which the original factor analytic studies were Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical based were not evaluated further for various good reasons (eg, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test had figured heavily in prior research, but is ill-suited for application in clinical trials). Then several tests were proposed that had not been used in the factor analyses, and which are quite reasonably considered tests of “reasoning and problem solving” but would less likely Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical be selected as selleck kinase inhibitor measures of “executive

functioning” and almost certainly would not be selected as measures of “frontal lobe functions.” For example, a maze-processing test was selected for the MATRICS final battery, even though no maze test was used in the original factor analytic studies, and while most scientists would agree that frontal function is important for maze performance, the contributions of nonfrontal systems are profound. Thus the construct label executive functions (associated with frontal system integrity), was split Into working memory and reasoning/problem solving, the latter of which was untethered from Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical its “frontal” system anchor. This highlights how breaking a construct into subcomponents can have unintended consequences, and in general shows that cognitive construct labels may be misleading. Indeed, it only becomes clear what the labels really mean when these are specified with respect to the Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical actual test variables used to measure the

construct. These issues are discussed in greater detail elsewhere, along with other examples showing how construct labels may reflect fashion more than science, and calling for routine specification of constructs at the measurement level.27-29 For example, in one literature-mining exercise the term “cognitive Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical control” was Entinostat defined completely at the measurement level by a set of four other labels including: working memory, response selection, response inhibition, and task switching/set shifting. Thus, the term “cognitive control” was used increasingly in the literature to describe results from the same tests that were previously branded with other labels. By the time Pribram had offered the coinage of executive functions and participated in the coinage of working memory, substantial progress had been made in recognizing key aspects of frontal lobe organization based on both clinical and basic research by Jacobsen, Halstead, Teuber, Luria, Fuster, Mishkin, Sanides, Stuss, Benson, and others.1,9,30-40 Among these contributions I single out for its elegance and simplicity the formulation of Luria1,41 as elaborated by Goldberg.