I have read Barkley's book and believe it provides an excellent perspective on executive function. I might differ with him on some of his anthropological/evolutionary perspectives on EF. I suspect that people in industrialized societies and cities do not necessarily require a more complex or more highly developed set of EF skills. Moderm man in traditional cultural settings and modern man in modern indistrialized states have the same evolutionary characteristics. But the book considers EF from a perspective of human behavior, and not of neural circuitry. Ultimately, when a concept is used to explain the nature of purposeful, goal-directed behavior, that anthropological approach seems preferable to me.

An analogy might be understanding how to use a computer. The functional properties of Windows Vista, and the techniques of navigating through the system may be more useful than undrstanding the structure of the microprocessor, or the machine programing language steps that accomplish that navigation.

The human brain is a complex structure, and whatever imaging techniques are employed, or neurocognitive tests administered, may not be able to adequately capture that complexity. Even the recent trends in mapping circuits may not be able to account for the cariability in how those circuits are constructed in different individuals. See Ma et al, "Compensatory Brain Activation in Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder During a Simplified Go/NoGo Task" in Journal of Neural Transmission, 3 December 2011 (DOI 10.1007/s00702-011-0744-0)

http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00702-011-0744-0/fulltext.html

Terry, I'm sorry that this answer will reach you several months after your question, and hope you'll still find some use for it. I believe that other folks are responding re: Barkley's book on Executive Functioning, but there is another that is a broader overview of ADHD called Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment (3rd ed.) that I would recommend over the former. While it is older (2005), it really does cover the range of topics that undergraduates would be interested in, and you could supplement with occasional articles to bring the material up to date. I have not found another general book about ADHD that is better.

As for an eating disorders text for undergraduates, I might recommend Pamela Keel's Eating Disorders. It's not my area, but I have heard good things.

Good luck!

Terry, my answer would be too late for your textbook considerations. In my experience in teaching eating disorders as a doctoral elective, I've found Christopher Fairburn's Overcoming binge eating very readable, informative, and engaging. Among Russell Barkley's books on ADHD and defiant children, I like his Taking charge of ADHD the most because he wrote with compassion and authority. If you want to discuss these topics further, please email me at [email protected]. Best,

Stephen

Thanks to all.