Maria Kielar-Turska

The paper presents Stefan Szuman as a multidimensional person both in his personal life and academic work. He was characterised by his academic knowledge in several areas: medicine, psychology and art. He communicated with professionals from various fields – philosophy, pedagogy, literary studies, linguistics and musicology – such as: Witkacy, Bruno Schulz or Jan Puget. In his research, he was interested in topics related to mental development (the essence of development; developmental factors; cognitive, emotional, personality changes), education, teaching (students’ attention, teaching skills) and communing with art. He used different research methods: observation, conversation, quasi-experiment and tests. He presented the results of his researches using appropriate and sophisticated language. The paper shows the current remembrance of Szuman and his works both through public events (e.g. art exhibitions) and conferences.

The paper discusses the relationship between language, cognition and behavior. It shows language as an external activator (the control function of speech) and an internal organizer of thoughts (private speech, inner speech). A. Luria’s research on the control function of speech has been continued in the study of the understanding of directives; L.S. Vygotsky’s concept of forms of speech has resulted in the imaginative research on private speech conducted since the 1980s, revealing the specifi city of private speech and the important part it plays in development, while studies of inner speech have helped to explain the role of language in thinking. Research on the executive functions allows us to track links between higher cognitive processes and language. It turns out that language and communication skills and vocabulary not only correlate with the developmental level of the executive functions, but are a good predictor of their development.

The paper presents an overview of basic issues related to executive functions, the phenomenon being the center of interest to psychologists at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, discussed from the historical, neurophysiological and ontogenetic perspectives. It gives basic information about the history of research on the executive functions and their neurophysiological correlates. At fi rst, the research focused on the function of the frontal cortex, which was thought to organize intellectual activity in adults with damage to that part of the brain. Studies in the ontogenetic paradigm have helped to explain the genesis of the executive functions, their complex nature, developmental changes and critical periods. They have also contributed to determining the relationship between the executive functions and other cognitive processes, such as theories of mind, or emotional processes, and to revealing the environmental conditions. The paper describes the complex nature of the executive functions, indicating the fixed components: inhibition, flexibility, working memory and planning, and presents psychological testing methods, pointing out the most commonly used techniques. The authors refer both to foreign and Polish authors studying groups of participants developing normally or with disorders in different periods of development, and they note the cognitive and the practical aspects of research on the executive functions.

The aim of the study was to describe the syntactic abilities of elderly people taking into account possible differences between young-olds (67–75; M = 72.55, SD = 1.99) and old-olds (76–90; M = 79.88, SD = 2.92) in this area. Spontaneously produced narrations were assessed taking into account the grammatical correctness, complexity and coherence. Working memory and cognitive flexibility (visual shifting and verbal fluency) were also measured. The analysis showed that the young-olds differ from the old-olds only in the coherence of their narrations. The relation between using anaphors and working memory capacity was also proved

The presented research examined the relationship between the use of knowledge, the development level of higher cognitive functions and the type of education. Research was conducted on two groups of third grade students: homeschoolers and public school students (28 children in each of the groups). Students were paired by sex and factors connected to the family environment. Ability to operate knowledge was tested by The original Reading Comprehension Test and the level of development of executive functions (inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility and planning) was measured by a set of tasks from Inquisit computer program. Results show that homeschoolers use and utilize their knowledge better than public school students. They comprehend meaning of words more efficiently, understand cause-effect relations better and use relations of superiority-inferiority more efficiently. However, the results connected with executive functions do not show any dominance of any of groups. Ability of inhibition and planning is similar for homeschoolers and public students. Public school students have higher level of memory development whereas homeschoolers dominate in the category of flexibility. The presented results are material for a discussion on the role of the educational system in the development of late childhood students. They can also be used to consider the assessment of the value of home education.

Old age is characterized by an age-related cognitive decline. The role of executive functions in this process has recently been indicated. The population of elderly people, however, is not homogenous in terms of intellectual functioning. This diversity may be explained by evoking the notion of cognitive reserve which posits that elderly people have different levels of resources enabling them to compensate for the negative changes. The level of the cognitive reserve is related to the level of the executive functions.
This study analyzes the relationship between the levels of three components of the executive functions: flexibility, working memory and planning, and educational, cultural or physical activities carried out throughout life. The results show that educational and cultural activities are important to working memory, while planning is additionally helped by physical activity. Further, some components of the executive functions are more infl uenced by activity before retirement, while others are more affected by activity after retirement.