title: Cognitive flexibility in young children: General or task-specific capacity?
abstract: Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing tasks or problems. To test whether cognitive flexibility is a coherent cognitive capacity in young children, we tested 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on two forms of task switching, rule-based (Three Dimension Changes Card Sorting, 3DCCS) and inductive (Flexible Induction of Meaning-Animates and Objects, FIM-Ob and FIM-An), as well as tests of response speed, verbal working memory, inhibition, and reasoning. Results suggest that cognitive flexibility is not a globally coherent trait; only the two inductive word-meaning (FIM) tests showed high inter-test coherence. Task- and knowledge-specific factors also determine children's flexibility in a given test. Response speed, vocabulary size, and causal reasoning skills further predicted individual and age differences in flexibility, although they did not have the same predictive relation with all three flexibility tests.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. Electronic address: gdeak@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: Gedeon O
authors.initials: GO
authors.lastname: Deák
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research, York University, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada.
authors.forename: Melody
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wiseheart
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Causal reasoning; Cognitive flexibility; Executive functions; Individual differences; Inhibition; Rule switching; Word learning; Working memory