These notes bring together my experience, published research and questions I would like to investigate during doctoral training. The proposed studies below are ideas, not completed research.

The Tuesday-afternoon problem

In executive-function coaching, I support young people with planning, task initiation, attention and self-management. A plan can be sensible, carefully discussed and fully understood, yet still struggle to survive an ordinary afternoon. That makes me curious about the conditions surrounding performance: the interruption, the competing goal, the moment when a person has to decide what to do next.

A hypothetical example makes the problem concrete. Two people obtain similar working-memory scores. One uses a checklist, notices when they have lost their place and returns to the task. The other manages well until an unexpected message arrives, then spends several minutes reconstructing the goal. Their final score might be similar; the route to that score is different.

The question I keep returning to is whether assessment could describe those routes more precisely. What helps someone remain organised? What disrupts them? How do they recover?

A score is an endpoint. Cognition is a process.

The distinction between cognitive tests and everyday ratings is not new. Toplak and colleagues’ influential review found weak convergence between performance-based executive-function measures and ratings. Their interpretation was that these methods capture different aspects of functioning. [1]

I read that as an invitation to make the question more specific. A structured task may show what a person can do under explicit instructions; an everyday account may describe how goals are managed across time and competing demands. Disagreement between them can be informative, rather than something to average away.

My MSc dissertation approached part of this problem through a Gorilla.sc cognitive battery and a digital dual-task simulation, including a grid task with and without traffic audio. It explored neurocognitive performance under competing demands. It was an academic dissertation, not a clinically validated screening instrument. The next challenge is connecting experimentally tractable demands to outcomes people recognise in their lives.

The neuroscience of changing demands

Recent network neuroscience makes a single “executive centre” an unsatisfying explanation. Nugiel and colleagues’ 2026 study compared working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility and rest within 62 young people. Attention and control networks showed both shared and task-specific connectivity; whole-brain integration and segregation also differed across tasks. [2]

Integration describes how strongly parts of a network coordinate; segregation describes how distinct its communities remain. Neither is a universal target to maximise. The useful arrangement may depend on the demand and the person’s developmental stage.

Mitchell and colleagues’ 2025 analysis of 9–11-year-olds found that greater reconfiguration from rest to executive tasks was associated with better performance. This contrasted with the adult pattern motivating their study. [3] A neural pattern described as “efficient” in one population should not automatically become a benchmark for another.

These are group-level associations from research tasks. They do not allow us to read an individual’s everyday difficulties from a scan. What they offer is a richer question: how does a developing cognitive system reorganise when the situation changes?

Three questions I would like to test

01 · Recovery after interruption

Could the time and strategy needed to resume a goal explain everyday functioning beyond average accuracy or speed? I would distinguish losing the goal, remembering it but delaying a return, and returning efficiently through an external cue. My working hypothesis is that the shape of recovery may be informative even when overall task scores look similar.

02 · Responsiveness to support

Assessment usually asks how someone performs. I also want to ask how performance changes when support is introduced. Compare the same task with a visible goal cue, fewer competing signals or a short planning pause. A person’s response to these changes could guide a practical support decision—if it predicts benefit outside the task.

03 · The changing cost of staying on track

Two people may achieve the same result with different effort. Repeated brief assessments could examine whether interruption costs vary with self-reported fatigue, setting and time of day. The aim would be to describe within-person patterns without interpreting every fluctuation as impairment.