Cognitive Flexibility

Cognitive Flexibility (CF) is the ability to switch between mental processes and appropriately change behavior in response. In other words, “Cognitive flexibility enables an individual to work efficiently to disengage from a previous task, reconfigure a new response set, and implement this new response set to the task at hand.”^​1​

Much of human behavior is characterized by our extraordinary ability to quickly reconfigure our mind and switch between different tasks. We can swiftly shift our focus from color and fabric, when sorting dirty clothes for laundry, to shape, when searching for socks in a pile of clothes fresh from the dryer. This ability, often referred to as cognitive flexibility, has been widely recognized as a core function of cognitive control (Diamond, 2013) and is of increasing importance in this digital age of multitasking (Eshet-Alkalai, 2004). ^​2​

In the EF literature, cognitive flexibility is also known as “shifting,” or “set-shifting.” Shifting, along with updating (working memory) and inhibition–later renamed to common EF (still inclusive of inhibition) is one of the three core EFs.^​3,4​ In studies of flexibility/shifting, the focus has been on task shifting, set shifting, or attentional shifting. ^​1​

Though cognitive flexibility is inclusive of switching/shifting, it is also more than that. CF requires the successful utilization of several other EFs. Working memory, inhibition, salience detection and attention, and switching all come together to form Cognitive flexibility.^​1​

Across the Lifespan

Childhood

Though the different components of cognitive flexibility have different developmental trajectories, overall CF as we know it starts to develop in early childhood, with “a sharp increase in abilities between 7 and 9 years of age,” and becoming “largely mature” by age 10 and peaking between the ages of 21-30 years old in neurotypical people. ¹

Children’s cognitive flexibility works differently than that of adults, at least until around the age of 8-9. Young children “tend to have difficulty processing task cues efficiently to determine the relevant task.” But around age 9 “children change their control strategies from retrieving the task goal by orienting their attention to the relevant stimulus features, to using cue–stimulus–response associations.”¹ “Inhibition and working memory contribute to successful cognitive flexibility beginning around 4 years of age.”^​1​

Adulthood

” Greater cognitive flexibility is associated with favorable outcomes throughout the lifespan,… higher resilience to negative life events and stress in adulthood [4], higher levels of creativity in adulthood”^​1​ “Cognitive flexibility becomes largely mature by 10 years of age [43] but skills continue to improve throughout adolescence and into adulthood [44,45], reach-ing their peak between the ages of 21 and 30 years “^​1​ ” Faster and more accurate cognitive flexibility skills in adulthood may be attributed to improvements in perceptual speed, superior working memory [46], improved resistance to interference from the irrelevant task [46,51], the use of associative processing [49], and im- proved task set reconfiguration abilities.”^​1​

Older Adults

Greater cognitive flexibility is associated with “better quality of life in older individuals”^​1​ The work environment can effect cognitive flexibility and cognitive function as well, ” A similar modulatory effect on neurocognitive processing can also be expected to originate from a long-lasting occupational envi- ronment: the more complex the demand characteristics of the work-setting, the greater the potential for maintenance or even enhancement of cognitive functioning which may compensate age related declines”^​5​ ” Thus, performance declines become visible when the task becomes dif- ficult and no compensation strategies were available.”^​5​

“Task switching has also been used repeatedly to investigate changes in executive functions in aging (…). Most of the studies did not find any impairment of switching performance per se (switch costs). Moreover, they found a selective decline of the maintenance of task goals in older participants (This suggests that the age-related impairments may be mainly due to deficits of the working memory: that is in sequencing, selecting and the flow of operations applied to the stored information and maintaining the information in an active state (…). Such a decline should be found at difficulties to follow the task sequence and consequently at the inability to set and prepare the next task set “^​5​

” In contrast, very low error rates could be found in older participants with flexi- ble work demands. This suggests that among other factors, flexible work may reduce cognitive decline. This supports the proposal of a huge interindividual variability in older age (Hultsch et al., 2002, 2004) which may be modified by environmental factors “^​5​

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