Orbitofrontal cortex-related executive functions in children and adolescents: their assessment and its ecological validity

This paper discusses the ecological validity of recently proposed tasks for the assessment of executive functions related to the Orbitofrontal Cortex, in children and adolescents. This topic is discussed considering two conceptually distinct approaches to ecological validity, verisimilitude and veridicality. The issue of ecological validity has been increasingly recognized in child neuropsychology, but an attention to this topic seems to lack in studies that assessed the development of Orbitofrontal cortex-related executive functions in children and adolescents with gambling tasks or delay of gratification tasks. An exception is represented by ADHD population, where specially delay aversion tasks seem to have a good veridicality-oriented ecological validity. The weakness of literature about the ecological validity of these executive measures must encourage to keep in mind ecological validity during the development of new tasks.