Cognitive Flexibility Or Flexibilities? Insights From A Classroom Study.

There is an ongoing debate in the scientific community regarding the nature of cognitive flexibility. It is either seen as a general executive process (set shifting), as a dimensional construct composed of reactive flexibility and spontaneous flexibility, or as a task-dependent skill. To help decide between these views, we analyzed the performances of 86 first-graders across four Cognitive Flexibility tasks. Two tasks focused on reactive flexibility (rule-shifting and predicate-shifting), and two tasks targeted spontaneous flexibility (role-shifting and divergent thinking). We also assessed children’s performance on three Executive Functions tasks (cognitive inhibition, verbal working memory, and visuomotor processing speed) to investigate the extent to which they correlate with cognitive flexibility. Significant — though moderate — positive correlations emerged among five out of the six pairs of cognitive flexibility tasks, regardless of whether they involved a reactive or spontaneous use of cognitive flexibility. Besides, none of the executive functions tasks systematically correlated with the four measures of cognitive flexibility. On the other hand, Confirmatory Factorial Analyses did not state whether cognitive flexibility is a unifactorial or bi-factorial construct. Overall, our results suggest that cognitive flexibility performance may reflect the recruitment of several task-dependent transversal processes. Implications with regard to the three postulates as well as future directions are discussed.