Those who study the brain or treat patients (or both) talk a lot about executive functioning, often in the negative. We refer to “poor executive functioning,” “executive dysfunction,” “frontal lobe systems dysfunction,” and similar issues as cognitive deficits to be resolved. There’s another aspect to executive function that needs to be considered, however, and that is intentionality.

We define executive functioning as the cognitive control processes—the mental operations that allow a person to coordinate behavior with an internally represented intention. In fact, intentionality is the foundation of the three most studied components of executive functioning:

The common denominator in these three is the ability to direct one’s cognition and behavior in accordance with a goal that lives inside the mind. The hidden assumption is that people actually know their intentions and that those intentions have an emotional salience, or importance. But do they?

For any executive function task, a person must know what they want, why it’s important to them, and what the target is. Modern research tends to treat intention and salience as stable and accessible, but this assumes people have clarity about their own goals. In fact, much executive “dysfunction” may simply be a mismatch between the assessor’s presumed goal and the individual’s true—often unspoken........

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