Substance Abuse as a Window into Executive Functioning: Real-World Insights for the Second Wave of Executive Function Research

Paulo Guirro Laurence^1*Kae Leopoldo^2,3

• ¹Center of Mathematics, Computing and Cognition, Federal University of ABC, Santo André, Brazil
• ²Psychology Institute, Universidade de Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
• ³Department of Psychiatry, Universidade de Sao Paulo Faculdade de Medicina, São Paulo, Brazil

The publication of Doebel's (2020) paper marked a turning point in executive function (EF) research by challenging the traditional view of EFs as universal, decontextualized cognitive skills. Instead, she argued that EFs should be understood as goal-directed processes shaped by context, social meaning, and cultural practices. This reconceptualization has been described as a "second wave" of EF research (Doebel & Müller, 2023), emphasizing that EF cannot be divorced from the environments and practices in which it is embedded. Rather than focusing narrowly on inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility as fixed capacities, the field is increasingly attentive to how children learn to regulate thoughts and actions in ways that are adaptive to their particular social and cultural worlds. Building on this shift, some scholars have gone further to argue that EF itself is culturally constructed-that the very idea of "executive function" reflects particular Western assumptions about autonomy, control, and cognition (Kroupin et al., 2025). While this position highlights the role of cultural framing, it is debated whether it risks overstating the case by neglecting common cognitive mechanisms that transcend cultural boundaries.Within this new wave, several contributions have expanded how EF development is conceptualized (see Munakata & Michaelson, 2021). Gaskins and Alcalá (2023) demonstrated how standard EF measures often fail to capture children's skills in communities such as the Yucatec Maya, where cultural practices of autonomy and responsibility demand sophisticated regulation of attention and behavior that traditional tasks overlook. Miller-Cotto et al. (2022) highlighted the limitations of deficit-based narratives in EF research, showing how assumptions about minoritized children often obscure the cultural responsiveness of their regulatory skills.Similarly, Yanaoka andcolleagues (2022, 2024) provided evidence that habits shaped by sociocultural practices-such as waiting before eating in Japan or delaying gift opening in the United States-play a critical role in children's ability to delay gratification, reframing inhibitory control as not only effortful but also supported by culturally ingrained habits. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that addiction research has historically framed substance use disorders as the result of a deficient self-control trait or module, a view prominent in influential biomedical accounts that characterize addiction as a disorder of impaired inhibitory regulation (e.g., Leshner, 1997;Volkow et al., 2016). However, more recent frameworks-most notably the biased-choice account by Wiers (2024) and by Le Pelley and colleagues (2024)-challenge the idea that addiction reflects a simple failure of a central control system. Instead, they emphasize how learned attentional biases, habits, goal competition, and socio-cultural reinforcement histories shape behavior, bringing addiction theory closer to the second-wave EF perspective that treats regulation as contextually embedded rather than purely trait-like. This conceptual shift mirrors the same movement occurring within developmental EF research, offering a productive bridge between the two fields. One of the central lessons of the second wave of executive function research is that context fundamentally shapes how regulatory processes unfold. Doebel (2020) emphasized that EF is not a fixed set of decontextualized skills but rather a flexible, goal-directed coordination of cognition that depends heavily on situational demands and sociocultural meaning. This reconceptualization has been reinforced by developmental work showing that children's EF varies across tasks depending on social framing, cultural practices, and the salience of goals (Gaskins & Alcalá, 2023;Miller-Cotto et al., 2022;Yanaoka et al., 2022). Yet, from the standpoint of addiction research, the observation that context can modulate EF is far from novel (for example, see Carbia et al., 2018). Decades of work on substance use disorders have demonstrated that changing environments-whether through removing cues that trigger craving, altering peer networks, or placing individuals in structured treatment settings-plays a decisive role in relapse prevention and other recovery outcomes. These findings underscore that EF processes are not just individual traits but dynamically expressed capacities, contingent upon the contexts in which people live and make decisions (Kim-Spoon et al., 2017).Substance use research also provides concrete evidence for how contextual changes modulate cognitive control. For example, binge drinking in particular has been linked to persistent deficits in EF, impairments that are exacerbated in high-risk contexts where social reinforcement of heavy drinking is common (Carbia et al., 2018;López-Caneda et al., 2014). At the same time, longitudinal and intervention studies show that altering environments-such as reducing exposure to alcohol-related cues or introducing supportive peer contexts-can mitigate these deficits and strengthen executive functioning (Carbia et al., 2018;Griffin & Botvin, 2010).Thus, addiction research highlights with remarkable clarity not only that context matters, but also the mechanisms through which environmental restructuring can either degrade or improve executive functioning (Carbia et al., 2018). This long-standing body of evidence enriches and grounds the "contextual turn" in EF research by showing how deeply regulatory capacities are intertwined with real-world environments. This evidence from substance abuse research reinforces the second wave's emphasis on context, but also shows that such insights have longstanding support in clinical research.Insight 2 -Inhibitory control: context-dependent but with a common substrate Yanaoka et al. (2022) provided important evidence that children's ability to delay gratification varies depending on the type of reward. In their study, Japanese and American children performed differently when the task involved food versus when it involved gifts, suggesting that inhibitory control is not uniform across contexts but tied to the nature of the desired outcome. This finding challenges traditional views of delay of gratification as a unitary capacity. In a later paper, Yanaoka and colleagues (2024) proposed that such variability may be explained by the role of habits, since everyday practices around food or gift-giving shape children's expectations and abilities to wait. Their work reframes inhibitory control as a process not only dependent on effortful self-regulation but also supported-or constrained-by culturally and socially ingrained routines. Yet this perspective also raises a central theoretical question for EF research: is inhibitory control entirely fragmented by context, or does it rest on an underlying mechanism that manifests differently depending on situational demands? Addiction research offers a valuable lens to approach this question. One of the most robust findings in the field is that comorbidity across substances is the norm rather than the exception-individuals with alcohol use disorders, for example, are at elevated risk of developing problems with nicotine, cannabis, or other drugs (Carbia et al., 2018). If inhibitory control were wholly context-specific, such cross-substance vulnerabilities would be far less frequent, given that the context and motivations for drug use are not completely overlapping and, sometimes, the use of a specific drug occurs in detriment of the use of another (sometimes called concurrent use; Gunn et al., 2022). Instead, the prevalence of polysubstance abuse indicates the existence of a common inhibitory substrate that contributes to difficulties in regulating diverse forms of reward-seeking behavior (Carbia et al., 2018;López-Caneda et al., 2014;Tapert & Eberson-Shumate, 2022). At the same time, patterns of use and relapse are clearly shaped by habits and contexts-availability of substances, reinforcement histories, and social environments strongly determine how inhibitory failures play out in everyday life (Carbia et al., 2018;López-Caneda et al., 2014). In this sense, substance abuse research complements Yanaoka et al.'s habit-based interpretation: inhibitory control is both context-dependent in its expression and grounded in a shared underlying mechanism. This comparative perspective helps reconcile the apparent tension in EF research between domain-specificity and generality, showing how both can coexist within a single, integrated framework. A similar reconciliation has recently been articulated, arguing from a developmental-systems perspective that EF should be understood as both context-dependent in its expression and grounded in domain-general processes (Zelazo & Carlson, 2023). This account frames variability across tasks and situations as the product of dynamic interactions between a core control system and the specific goals, histories, and affordances present in each context. Such a view parallels evidence from both developmental and addiction research: a shared inhibitory substrate that becomes shaped, enabled, or constrained by habits, social routines, and cultural practices. This perspective therefore offers an additional theoretical anchor for interpreting inhibitory control as simultaneously general in its architecture and deeply embedded in the environmental and sociocultural conditions under which it is deployed.A complementary line of evidence comes from long-term developmental research. In a 30-year longitudinal study, Moffitt et al. (2011) showed that childhood self-control predicted a range of hazardous adolescent behaviors, including early tobacco use, school dropout, and substance dependence, even after accounting for intelligence and socioeconomic status. This work demonstrates that inhibitory control has predictive power that generalizes across contexts and developmental periods, aligning with the notion of a shared regulatory substrate. At the same time, substantial unexplained variability in these outcomes points to the influence of environmental and social factors, echoing the second-wave emphasis on context shaping the expression of regulatory mechanisms.Importantly, Yanaoka et al. (2024) do not argue against the existence of a general inhibitory mechanism. Rather, their findings underscore that the expression of this mechanism is intertwined with habits and cultural practices that shape when and how inhibitory control is deployed. In this sense, their work aligns with the evidence from addiction studies: inhibitory processes may be general in their neural and cognitive underpinnings, but they acquire specificity through the contexts and routines that give them practical meaning.Taken together, findings from developmental EF research and addiction studies point to striking parallels in how context, habits, and shared mechanisms shape regulatory processes. To make these connections more explicit, Table 1 summarizes the main points of convergence and their implications for understanding executive function in the second wave. (Doebel, 2020;Munakata & Michaelson, 2021).Recovery depends on altering environments: removing cues, changing peer networks, structured settings (Carbia et al., 2018;López-Caneda et al., 2014).Both show that context is not peripheral but central to self-regulation. Delay of gratification varies by reward type; habits explain differences (Yanaoka et al., 2022(Yanaoka et al., , 2024)).High comorbidity across substances suggests a shared inhibitory substrate despite contextual variability (Carbia et al., 2018).Inhibitory control is both context-dependent in expression and supported by common mechanisms. The second wave of executive function research has emphasized that EFs are not fixed skills but adaptive, goal-directed processes shaped by context, culture, and social practices (Doebel, 2020;Munakata & Michaelson, 2021) (Carbia et al., 2018;López-Caneda et al., 2014).Beyond these considerations, recent theorizing in addiction research has converged strikingly with the second-wave view of EF by emphasizing how habits, learned attentional biases, and socio-cultural contexts shape regulation. The biased choice framework proposed by Wiers (2024) and Le Pelley and colleagues (2024) argues that addiction reflects not a loss of control but a competition among potential behavioral goals, in which drug-related cues gain attentional priority through learning and incentive salience, thereby biasing choice toward drug use even when intentions conflict. This perspective aligns closely with contemporary EF accounts that highlight how prior experiences, habits, social practices, and cultural routines scaffold or constrain the deployment of control. In both fields, regulation is understood as emerging from interactions between top-down goals and history-driven biases, offering a shared conceptual lens that bridges developmental EF research with addiction science.Crucially, substance abuse represents one of the most ecologically valid and consequential domains in which EF is expressed. Decisions about resisting urges, regulating habits, and maintaining long-term goals under pressure exemplify how executive processes operate in real-world, high-stakes contexts (Tapert & Eberson-Shumate, 2022). This makes addiction research a natural laboratory for testing and refining context-based theories of EF, bridging the gap between experimental paradigms and lived experience.Taken together, the convergence between EF and addiction research highlights that understanding executive processes requires holding together two perspectives: their contextsensitivity and their shared mechanisms. Addiction research demonstrates how these processes play out in the most consequential real-world settings, where failures of regulation carry immediate costs and successes support long-term adaptation. Recognizing this duality can guide EF research toward models that are both theoretically rigorous and practically relevant, bridging laboratory findings with the realities of everyday self-regulation.