The Executive System and its Disorders

Attributes of the Executive System The executive system has been traditionally quite hard to pin down, mainly due to what Burgess (1997) calls a lack of “process-behaviour correspondence”. That is, there is no single behaviour which can in itself be tied to executive function, or indeed executive dysfunction. For example, it is quite obvious what reading impaired patients cannot do, but it is not so obvious as to exactly what executive impaired patients might be incapable of.