Ionescu Thea, Goldstone Robert L, Rogobete Doris, Taranu Mihaela
Psychology, Universitatea Babes-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca, RO.
Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, US.
J Cogn. 2024 Oct 10;7(1):73. doi: 10.5334/joc.403. eCollection 2024.
In the present exploratory study we investigate whether cognitive flexibility is a unitary mechanism underlying flexible behaviours across many domains or a domain-specific capacity. The literature on cognitive flexibility is divided into several research lines that do not converge. The most prominent one considers flexibility an executive function that represents the ability to switch among rules or tasks. In other research traditions it is associated with distinct components, such as the capacity to place an item into many categories (in creativity tests) or a characteristic of different cognitive or perceptual processes (e.g., flexible language use, flexibility in mathematics, perceptual flexibility). To determine whether flexibility in different domains relies on a general shared mechanism, 221 subjects from two countries (The United States and Romania, mean age 19.52 years) were tested online with several measurements from four different domains of investigation: language, mathematics, perception, and executive functions (specifically, set shifting). All tasks required some form of cognitive flexibility. In addition, we measured math anxiety to see how this relates to mathematical flexibility. The results show very few and small significant partial correlations among the tasks. They also highlight that there is no unitary overarching "executive" factor. The most prominent common factor was speed of processing for mathematical and language response times. Shifting does not seem to be a mechanism that underlies flexibility in all the investigated domains. While we acknowledge the need for replication of this study, the data suggest that the construct of shifting does not exhaust the notion of flexibility as it arises across cognitive domains.
在本探索性研究中，我们探究认知灵活性究竟是一种支撑众多领域灵活行为的单一机制，还是一种特定领域的能力。关于认知灵活性的文献分为几条互不交汇的研究路线。最突出的一条路线认为灵活性是一种执行功能，代表在规则或任务之间切换的能力。在其他研究传统中，它与不同的组成部分相关联，比如在创造力测试中将一个项目归入多个类别的能力，或者不同认知或感知过程的一种特征（例如，灵活运用语言、数学灵活性、感知灵活性）。为了确定不同领域的灵活性是否依赖于一种普遍共享的机制，我们对来自两个国家（美国和罗马尼亚，平均年龄19.52岁）的221名受试者进行了在线测试，测试内容涵盖四个不同研究领域的多项测量：语言、数学、感知和执行功能（具体为任务转换）。所有任务都需要某种形式的认知灵活性。此外，我们测量了数学焦虑，以了解它与数学灵活性之间的关系。结果显示，各项任务之间几乎没有显著的部分相关性，而且相关性也很小。结果还突出表明，不存在一个单一的总体“执行”因素。最显著的共同因素是数学和语言反应时间的处理速度。任务转换似乎并不是所有被研究领域灵活性的潜在机制。虽然我们承认有必要重复这项研究，但数据表明，任务转换这一概念并不能涵盖认知领域中出现的灵活性概念。
