Impulsiveness and executive control of working memory

Deficits in the executive control system of working memory (WM) may explain some of the cognitive and behavioral problems exhibited by individuals identified as being impulsive on self-report measures. However, existing measures of executive control tend to collapse across several potentially dissociable indices. Therefore, people who score high on a self-report measure of impulsiveness may achieve that high score based on fundamentally different executive control processing difficulties. In the present study we predicted impulsiveness scores from several different measures of executive control, including a novel measure of memory scanning. Results of this study indicate that different subtypes of impulsivity are related to different aspects of executive control. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.