Abstract Research on executive function has grown dramatically over the past three decades. Even though the term emerged only 40 years ago, the concept of executive function can be traced back to far earlier clinical and empirical research on the frontal lobes. After a brief overview of the history of executive function, we discuss influential theories of executive function. We next review the development of the prefrontal cortex and the neural substrate, which has been associated with executive function, and summarize research on particular component processes of executive function. Research on executive function faces a variety of methodological challenges that we review in the next section. The sources of executive function development are examined in the next section, with particular emphasis on the ways in which social factors and language facilitate its development. Our next section summarizes research of executive function on two other domains of functioning, namely, social understanding and academic achievement. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that executive function should be studied as a distributed process that develops as a result on the child's embodied interaction within a social context.
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