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Personality / Capacities

Capacity for Attention and Learning

This is the capacity that lets you follow a conversation in a noisy room, keep a phone number in your head long enough to dial it, notice that a plan isn’t working and try another, and come out of a hard experience having learned something. The PDM-3, which lists it first among its 13 mental capacities, gives it the subtitle “executive functioning.” It covers the higher-order processes that let us plan, direct our thoughts, feelings, and actions toward goals, and respond flexibly when circumstances change (Lingiardi, Muzi, & Bornstein, 2026, p. 713).

Its ingredients include inhibition (holding back an impulse or screening out an irrelevant stimulus), working memory, focused attention, and cognitive flexibility, along with planning, organizing, reading social and emotional cues, and several kinds of memory (p. 714). Together, the manual says, these skills let us take in what is happening inside and around us, filter out what doesn’t matter, and learn from experience in ways that help us adapt and cope.

Two things set this capacity apart from the others. It is the one most dependent on outside evidence: a clinician’s first impression may rest on what the person says, but testing, records, or the observations of someone who knows them well make the rating more trustworthy. And it moves with a person’s state. Anxiety, shame, anger, fatigue, illness, and medications can all change how well it works from one day to the next (p. 714). Nobody’s attention is equally good everywhere, and a lower rating here describes how a mind is working, not what a person is worth.

Across the Range

The PDM-3 describes three anchor points on its five-point scale (Lingiardi et al., 2026, pp. 714–715). Ratings of 4 and 2 fall between them.

5: Healthy
The person is appropriately focused, well organized, and able to adapt and learn from experience, even under stress. They can express thoughts and feelings well, in words and without them. Memory, attention, planning, flexibility, problem solving, and the ability to hold back a response all work well and work together.
3: Mild to moderate difficulties
The person is generally focused and able to learn, especially when motivated or in the right circumstances. When not fully engaged or when stressed, functioning drops somewhat, and putting inner experience into words gets harder. Shifting attention, planning a sequence of steps, and processing information toward a goal take effort, and focus holds only for fairly short stretches.
1: Major to severe difficulties
Attention is fleeting, with great difficulty pulling it away from a perceived threat or screening out irrelevant information. Thinking may be rigid, and organizing and carrying out goal-directed behavior is very hard. The person may struggle to learn from experience or plan ahead, and may seem absorbed in themselves, ruminative, or, in the most severe cases, lethargic. Expression of thoughts and feelings may be impoverished or unusual.

How It Develops

The PDM-3 describes this capacity as rooted in genetic predisposition, temperament, and a network of frontal and corticolimbic brain regions, all of which can be shaped by a person’s social and emotional context, beginning with early interactions with caregivers. Out of these influences each of us develops characteristic leanings in how we attend and learn, which later show up in how we deal with people and the world (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 714).

Adolescence is a period of rapid change. The prefrontal cortex reorganizes, unused connections are pruned, and the regions behind cognitive control are not fully mature until around age 25. Researchers distinguish “cold” executive functions, which are purely cognitive, from “hot” ones, which involve emotion and reward. Mastery of the hot functions comes later, which may help explain why teenagers can understand a risk perfectly well in the abstract and still take it in an emotionally charged moment with friends watching (Tanzilli & Malberg, 2026, pp. 414–415). The manual’s developmental guidelines trace a path from young teenagers who still need adults to plan their steps to older teenagers who can juggle several plans at once (p. 416).

In later life, learning new tasks often becomes harder and thinking more concrete, yet many people keep their learning abilities well into old age, and older adults seem to attend more to positive information. Clinicians assessing older people have to separate lifelong patterns from changes brought by aging and from neurocognitive disorders (Del Corno & Plotkin, 2026, pp. 905–906).

Research outside psychoanalysis points the same way. Adele Diamond’s review of executive functions notes that stress, lack of sleep, loneliness, and lack of exercise all impair them, and that they can be improved with practice (Diamond, 2013).

How It Shows Up in Personality

Executive functioning is partly a matter of equipment, but personality shapes how that equipment is used. The PDM-3 places severe deficits in executive functioning among the features at the most disturbed end of the personality continuum (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 655). At the healthy level, this capacity is usually reliable but can still falter under enough stress (p. 657).

Some styles make characteristic use of attention. People with an obsessive style live largely “in their heads,” thinking, judging, and doubting, and their self-esteem often depends on thinking (pp. 679–680). Their focus can be a real strength, though the same mental energy can turn into rumination. People with a hypomanic style can be highly distractible. McWilliams (2011, p. 264) notes that this can be mistaken for adult attention-deficit disorder; underlying themes of loss and longing, kept at bay through denial, point toward the personality pattern, though a person can have both.

Painful states interfere with learning in everyone, which is why the manual stresses that performance varies with mood and setting (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 714). For people with an emotionally dysregulated style, neuroscientific research suggests that early trauma can damage capacities for executive control and affect regulation (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 696). The capacity also matters for caregiving: the PDM-3 describes executive functioning as a fundamental part of responsive, sensitive parenting, helping a tired parent hold back a reaction and stay on task with a frustrated child (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 746).

How Different Thinkers See It

Ego psychology

Long before the term “executive function” became common, ego psychologists studied the mind’s organizing and adaptive capacities. Leopold Bellak and colleagues rated 12 ego functions, including thought processes, autonomous functioning, synthetic-integrative functioning, and mastery-competence (Bellak, Hurvich, & Gediman, 1973, as summarized by Buchborn et al., 2023). The broader idea of “ego strength,” the capacity to face reality without resorting to primitive defenses, became a lasting part of psychoanalytic diagnosis (McWilliams, 2011, p. 29).

Executive function research

Cognitive psychologists describe executive functions as general-purpose control processes that regulate thoughts and behavior. Akira Miyake and Naomi Friedman’s “unity and diversity” framework holds that different executive functions are correlated yet separable, have substantial genetic contributions, relate to clinically important outcomes, and show some stability over development (Miyake & Friedman, 2012). Diamond (2013) names three core functions: inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. The PDM-3’s definition draws directly on this vocabulary.

ADHD research

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is related to this capacity but is not the same thing. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition marked by inattention, disorganization, and hyperactivity or impulsivity at levels that interfere with functioning, and many of its features, such as poor time management and difficulty sustaining attention, relate to executive deficits (Tanzilli & Speranza, 2026, p. 530). In 1997 Barkley proposed that ADHD stems mainly from deficits in behavioral inhibition; later researchers moved toward models with multiple developmental pathways, and some argued that executive deficits, though common, may not be the primary problem (Salehpour & Gonzalez-Lima, 2026). The M-Axis capacity, by contrast, is a dimension everyone has. A low rating is not an ADHD diagnosis, and someone with ADHD may function well on many other capacities.

The PDM’s relational view

What the PDM-3 adds is an insistence that attention is relational and emotional. It describes the capacity as developing through caregiving, sensitive to affect, and bound up with how people relate to others (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 714). In adolescence, learning is strongly shaped by social information and the pull of peer approval (Tanzilli & Malberg, 2026, p. 415). Among adolescents with ADHD, the manual describes a tendency to build an identity around the diagnosis and its stigma, an “ADHD-defined self” (Tanzilli & Speranza, 2026, p. 531), which links this capacity to self-esteem.

Examples

Coming late may not always be resistance

Nancy McWilliams describes a friend who kept promising to call on Monday and then called on Wednesday or Thursday, puzzled by McWilliams’ irritation. McWilliams, a very organized person, assumed the lateness expressed hidden negative feelings. Only after a lecture on adult attention-deficit disorder, titled “Coming Late May Not Always Be Resistance,” did she remember that her friend had once been given that diagnosis. With a better framework, she could stop reading motives into the lapses and simply expect the call within a few days.

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Case Formulation (1999), p. 107

Emilia’s fear of losing her memory

In one of the PDM-3’s published case illustrations, an 84-year-old woman named Emilia was referred because she feared she was losing her memory and would soon be unable to live alone. She did crossword puzzles in the waiting room so as “not to become too stupid.” Assessment found only age-related slowing, and she was rated 4 on this capacity. Her real distress lay not in failing memory but in the painful memories themselves, with their anger, guilt, and shame. As she worked through them, her worry about becoming “stupid” receded.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 38–43

Martin’s uneven profile

Another case illustration describes Martin, a 39-year-old man with severe obsessional anxiety whose overall mental functioning falls in the “major impairments” range. He is nonetheless rated 4 on attention and learning, and as therapy progressed he learned to make better use of his cognitive resources, enough to continue his studies. The case shows how one capacity can remain a relative strength while others are badly strained.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 30–36

History

In the first PDM (2006), this capacity appeared as the “capacity for regulation, attention, and learning,” the first of nine categories of mental functioning (Stern, 2009). The PDM-2 kept that name at the head of its 12 capacities (Gori et al., 2025). The PDM-3 renamed it the capacity for attention and learning, adding “executive functioning” in parentheses (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 710). In effect, the change aligned it with the language of cognitive neuroscience, while other capacities, such as affect and impulse regulation, cover much of what “regulation” once named.

Its intellectual ancestors include ego psychology’s inventories of ego functions (Bellak et al., 1973) and, for children, Stanley Greenspan’s concept of regulatory disorders, which grew into the PDM’s category of regulatory–sensory processing difficulties in infancy (Speranza & Steele, 2026, p. 40). Research on executive functions expanded rapidly in parallel, as did research on ADHD, which over the decades shifted from a focus on hyperactivity toward deficits in executive functioning and then toward more complex, multiple-pathway models (Salehpour & Gonzalez-Lima, 2026).

Earlier editions listed specific assessment tools for each capacity; the PDM-3 dropped those lists for adults (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 711), though its adolescent chapter still names measures such as intelligence scales and executive-function rating inventories (Tanzilli & Malberg, 2026, pp. 448–449).

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