The passage you cited from Tranel, Cooper, and Rodnitzky in Neuroscience in Medicine provides a broad, categorical definition of higher-order brain functions, encompassing a wide spectrum of cognitive and behavioral domains.[1] To answer your question directly: Executive functioning is not the same as the entirety of "cognition" as defined in your excerpt; rather, it is a specialized subset or a "superordinate" component of those higher-order capacities.

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While the definition provided by Tranel et al. lists "judgment, planning, and decision-making" as distinct items within the broader umbrella of cognition, neuropsychological literature typically classifies these specific items as the core constituents of executive function.[2] Executive function is often described in clinical neurology as the "CEO" of the brain—the cognitive control system that orchestrates the other functions listed in your excerpt, such as memory, attention, and language, to achieve goal-directed behavior.[3]

In authoritative texts, cognition is viewed as the "what" (the information processed, such as language or memory), whereas executive function is the "how" (the management and regulation of that information). For instance, while memory is a cognitive capacity, the ability to strategically retrieve information from memory to solve a novel problem is an executive function.[2] [3] Therefore, your excerpt describes the components of the human cognitive architecture, while executive functioning represents the regulatory processes that allow those components to operate in a coordinated, purposeful manner.

Would you like to learn more about the specific neuroanatomical structures, such as the prefrontal cortex, that are primarily responsible for mediating executive functions?