A Tale of Two Flexibilities: Preschoolers' Developing Consecutive and Concurrent Cognitive Flexibility Skills

Abstract

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to think of something in more than one way. Research examining cognitive flexibility in 3-to 5-year-olds typically focuses on consecutive cognitive flexibility-the ability to consider several dimensions of a single stimulus one after another (e.g., sorting cards depicting blue boats and red rabbits by colour and then by shape). However, relatively little research examines preschoolers' concurrent cognitive flexibility skills-their ability to coordinate several dimensions of a single stimulus simultaneously (e.g., understanding that a blue boat can be both blue and a boat at the same time). The current work focuses on emerging concurrent cognitive flexibility skills in preschoolers. In Study 1, though a structural differentiation between consecutive and concurrent cognitive flexibility was not supported, an exploration of the data suggested that these skills are affected differently by abstraction demands-whether children had to induce the relevant dimensions on their own or were told which dimensions to consider. In this study, 121 preschoolers (Mage = 48.12 months; SD = 5.37) received 6 different cognitive flexibility tasks. Consistent with Jacques and Zelazo's (2005) review, children found deductive tasks-tasks in which the experimenter provides all the information to the participants-easier than inductive tasks-tasks that required children to identify the relevant dimensions themselves-in the context of consecutive cognitive flexibility. In contrast, these children found inductive concurrent cognitive flexibility tasks easier than deductive concurrent cognitive flexibility tasks, indicating that abstraction demands affect children's performance on these two cognitive flexibility skills differently. In Study 2, this finding was partially replicated using an experimental design: under certain conditions, 5-year-olds (N = 76) found concurrent It is remarkable how many people this project involved. I could not begin to thank all of these people, so the following acknowledgements are hardly an exhaustive list.

Event-Based Prospective Memory and Executive Functioning: The Effects of Motivation and Goal Maintenance Support

“…The experimenter demonstrated the action (or lack of action) in a demonstration trial in which they showed children what they should do if they heard, "Simon says touch your knees", and if they just heard, "Touch your knees". Children Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS; modified from Zelazo, 2006, as in Prodjarny, 2015See Appendix S). In this task, children were shown cards that varied along two dimensions, colour and shape (e.g., red rabbits and blue boats) and were instructed to sort them into two boxes.…”