Scoping Review Maps the State of Executive Function Research Across Africa

Executive function—the set of cognitive processes that lets children hold information in mind, suppress impulses, and switch between tasks—has become one of developmental psychology’s most intensively studied constructs. Yet a new scoping review published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology reveals just how unevenly that research effort has been distributed. After systematically screening 7,655 articles, researchers Chika Ezeugwu, Stephen Bayley, and Sara Baker, based at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, identified only 182 studies of executive function conducted across the entire African continent, a region home to 54 sovereign countries and a child population projected to reach one billion by 2055.

The review, which followed the PRISMA-ScR checklist for scoping reviews, searched seven databases including APA PsycINFO, ERIC, Scopus, and Web of Science for publications between 1990 and September 2025. Rather than simply searching for the word Africa—a term the authors deliberately excluded because it would pull in studies of African American learners in the United States—they combined executive function keywords such as inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and self-regulation with the names of each of the 54 African countries and eight territories. Supplementary searches of reference lists, direct contact with authors, and an international webinar on executive function in Sub-Saharan Africa added 107 more candidate studies. After screening, 311 papers underwent full-text reading and 129 were excluded, leaving the final corpus of 182 studies.

The geographic picture that emerged was starkly lopsided. Although the included studies spanned 27 African countries, from Botswana and Burkina Faso to Tunisia and Zambia, nearly half of all research came from just three nations: South Africa accounted for 33.9 percent of studies with 62 papers, Ghana contributed 12 percent with 22, and Kenya 6.6 percent with 12. Participants ranged in age from six months to 79 years, with sample sizes between eight and 3,867 people. The earliest eligible study was published in 2001, and publication frequency has climbed since then, peaking in 2022—a sign of growing interest, but from a very low baseline compared with the more than three million Google Scholar hits returned for executive function development research generally.

Equally striking was who conducted the work. More than half of the first authors were affiliated with institutions outside the African continent, and over 56 percent of recorded funding for first authors came from external sources. The authors argue this pattern matters scientifically, not just politically: researchers embedded in local contexts can contextualize the cognitive processes under investigation, develop culturally grounded measures, and move the field beyond extending minority-world research questions and paradigms to new populations. They call for what they describe as Africanized perspectives on executive function, developed with meaningful involvement from local researchers.

On the conceptual level, the news was more encouraging. Most of the 182 studies converged on a broadly consistent definition of executive function as a higher-order cognitive process responsible for regulating deliberate behavior—the capacity to act intentionally rather than automatically. But beneath that consensus lay considerable heterogeneity in how the construct was modeled. A third of the studies, 61 papers or 33.5 percent, treated executive function as tripartite, following the influential framework of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility established by Miyake and colleagues in 2000. Another 36 percent adopted a domain-general model, treating executive function as one facet of general cognition without decomposing it, while 16 studies focused specifically on working memory. Only five studies used a strictly unitary model and five a dual-component model, and 30 papers specified no model at all.

This fragmentation has practical consequences. The weight of evidence from high-income settings suggests the three-component model fits data reasonably well after the preschool years, whereas a single-factor model prevails in early childhood, and the review found that African studies followed a similar pattern, with unitary models more common for younger samples. But whether the same developmental timeline holds across cultures remains an open question—one the authors say can only be answered with more data from majority-world settings, where most of the world’s population actually lives.

Methodologically, the field in Africa leans heavily on imported tools. Ninety-five percent of the studies—173 of 182—adopted or adapted measures developed outside the continent, and 161 studies used task-based measures rather than interviews or self-reports. Experiments and cross-sectional designs dominated, with 98 experimental and 42 cross-sectional studies, compared with just 22 longitudinal designs and 13 randomized controlled trials. Most data collection took place in schools, which accounted for 45.6 percent of study locations. Convergence between different types of measures was mixed: one study found positive correlations between assessor reports and direct assessments, while others found no agreement between report-based and task-based measures at all.

There were notable exceptions to the imported-tool pattern. One research team replaced the classic Marshmallow test with a culturally relevant self-regulation task involving puff-puff, a locally familiar deep-fried dough, in a study with Cameroonian children. A handful of others used locally designed performance-based measures, and two studies interviewed preschool teachers about how they perceive executive function behaviors in children. Where measures were formally validated for local use—including the Early Learning Outcomes Measure in South Africa, the Childhood Executive Functioning Inventory in Kenya, the Arabic version of the BENCI battery in Egypt, and tablet-based assessments in Ghana and Tanzania—they generally showed good reliability and validity, suggesting adaptation is feasible when done carefully.

The findings on how executive function relates to context and outcomes were the most complicated part of the picture. Positive associations emerged with parental education, family stimulation, play behaviors, early childhood education, physical activity, and access to school meals. Negative associations appeared with punitive school environments, parental maltreatment, teacher burnout, maternal alcohol consumption during pregnancy, and stunting. But other results defied expectations: in one Nigerian study, children who had experienced parental loss actually showed enhanced working memory, and in South African samples, exposure to violence and adverse childhood experiences was not associated with self-regulation at all. The link between executive function and academic skills was equally mixed—working memory predicted numeracy, literacy, and school completion in one study, while in others none of the three components predicted literacy or numeracy outcomes.

Intervention evidence was similarly inconsistent. Teacher training programs, executive function games such as red-light purple-light, expressive writing exercises, zinc and micronutrient supplementation, and participation in a public works safety net showed no consistent benefits for children’s executive function. Yet yoga and aerobic dance programs, milk added to school meals, and certain food supplements did produce improvements in some trials. The authors caution that the heterogeneity in definitions, measures, and designs across the 182 studies limits direct comparisons, and that small samples spread across a wide age range constrain strong conclusions. Their prescription for the field is twofold: more qualitative, ethnographic work to understand what executive function means within African cultural contexts before importing constructs wholesale, and locally inspired measurement tools—either adapted or newly developed and validated—so that future meta-analyses can rest on evidence that genuinely represents the continent where a billion children will grow up.

Subject of Research: Executive function research in African populations: a scoping review of definitions, methods, and findings

Article Title: What we know about executive function research in Africa: A scoping review

Article References: Ezeugwu, C., Bayley, S., & Baker, S. (2026). What we know about executive function research in Africa: A scoping review. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 4, Article 1885696. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2026.1885696

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fdpys.2026.1885696

Keywords: executive function, Africa, scoping review, child development, cognitive development, working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, cross-cultural psychology, measurement validity, low-income countries, developmental psychology