us to be flexible in a controlled way according to the demands of the situation, but also the maintenance component, allowing us to not change our functioning or way of thinking in a controlled way, if this proves to be appropriate to the situation.
We can thus ask ourselves what it means to be flexible, to change, in a controlled way, representation, ways of thinking and strategy according to the requirements of the situation. If we subscribe to such a definition, some of the tasks mentioned above might not fall into the category of cognitive flexibility tasks as such.
All of these tasks, of the reaction time type, which only involve switching from one mode of response to another in a few fractions of a second, certainly make it possible to assess a switching cost. But they do not really allow us to assess cognitive flexibility in the sense of our ability to switch, in a controlled way, from one task to another according to the requirements of the situation, and not according to a possible learning of a correspondence between a cue and a task to be performed.
This assessment would require, on the one hand, proposing more elaborate tasks and, on the other hand, making sure that there has been a conceptualization and a maintenance of the use of the first task. Indeed, in order to consider that a person switches in a flexible, controlled way between two tasks, it is necessary to be sure that the first task has been implemented as such by the person. To take an example: if I sleep during the mathematics lesson, it will probably be easier for me to switch to the French lesson than for another student who has fully invested themselves in learning during the mathematics lesson and in doing the exercises.
As we have been able to demonstrate (Maintenant et al. 2013; Maintenant and Pennequin 2016), in the field of categorial flexibility, switching in a controlled manner from one mode of categorization to another involves not only the executive aspects inherent to this activity (flexibility, inhibition), but also the conceptualization of the modes of categorization to be used. The quality of the representation and the level of mastery of the activities, which we must switch between during a flexibility task, are therefore crucial and must be taken into account during an assessment.
As already proposed by Karmiloff-Smith (1992, 1994), cognitive flexibility implies a possibility of representational redescription. Whether it is in the context of an assessment by a task switching situation or in the context of an assessment by categorial flexibility or problem-solving tasks (Clément 2006; Clément and Gavornikova-Baligand 2010), it seems to emerge from these measures of cognitive flexibility that it is necessary to represent the same object or the same situation in different ways. Cognitive flexibility thus seems to imply “re” representing a stimulus, with different levels of possible conceptual representations, from the lowest level, such as learned associations between cues and specific responses (task switching) to higher levels, such as problem-solving situations involving a modification of the conceptualization of a situation.
1.4. Conclusion
Cognitive flexibility is very present in our daily lives, throughout our lives and is lacking in many pathologies, so its measurement appears to be necessary and informative for psychologists and psychological researchers.
The set of measures presented here clearly shows the great diversity that exists concerning these tools for measuring cognitive flexibility. In addition to the reminder of the type of flexibility measured, which may depend largely on the type of tool chosen, we encourage practitioners and researchers to cross-reference information sources and to make this great diversity a strength, allowing for a better approach to the real competence of the person being assessed.
1.5. References
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