Cognitive Flexibility. Evelyne Clement
Whether in practice or in research, we may wish to use more playful situations to assess flexibility, depending on the age or specificity of the participants. The following two situations, for example, can be used for this purpose.
The innovation paradigm consists of asking the child to draw an object that does not exist (Karmiloff-Smith 1990). The child must first draw objects that really exist (house, man, animal) and then draw these same objects, but also those that do not exist in our world (Picard and Vinter 2005). Young children (4 to 6 years) make intracategorical changes, that is, they only change the size or shape of the object itself, without introducing intercategorical changes. These changes appear later (8 to 10 years) and correspond to the introduction of an element of one category (the wings of a bird for example) on a drawing of another category (a house).
Another fun way to assess flexibility in young children, for example, is to use a drawing of a character starting with the foot (Baldy 2010) to assess the possibility of switching to another procedure in a flexible way. This involves slowing down the routine of drawing a man, which usually always starts with the head, by requiring the child to start the drawing with one of the man’s feet.
Table 1.1 summarizes the examples of direct measurement flexibility tests presented in this chapter. The target population (children or adults) is specified, as well as the ages, if necessary, and the presence of a norm is indicated in brackets when available. The last column shows the type of measurement proposed: first, if it is a question of reactive flexibility, that is, in response to an instruction or cue, or a change in the characteristics of the stimuli, or spontaneous flexibility, the situation proposed induces a certain amount of flexibility, but the changes are initiated by the individual themselves. Then, it details if the change is requested at each trial (item by item) or by series of items (by block), or if the procedure corresponds to task switching.
Table 1.1. Examples of flexibility tasks in direct measurement
| Authors | Population | Type of measurement | |
| Trail Making Test | Reitan and Wolfson (1993) | Adults | Reactive Item by item |
| Trail Making Test for preschoolers | Espy and Cwik (2004) | Preschoolers | Reactive Item by item |
| Color Trail Test | D’Elia et al. (1996) | Adults | Reactive Item by item |
| Children’s Color Trail Test | Williams et al. (1995) | Children aged 8 to 16 years old | Reactive Item by item |
| Plus minus | Jersild (1927) | Adults | Reactive Task switching |
| Wisconsin Card Sorting Test | Grant and Berg (1948) | Adults | Reactive Per block |
| Brixton Spatial Anticipation Test | Burgess and Shallice (1996) | Adults | Reactive Per block |
| Brixton Preschool | Lehto and Uusitalo (2006) | Preschoolers | Reactive Per block |
| Dimensional Change Card Sort | Doebel and Zelazo (2015) | Preschoolers | Reactive Per block |
| Local Global Task | Miyake et al. (2000) | Adults | Reactive Task switching |
| Number-letter task | Rogers and Monsell (1995) | Adults | Reactive Task switching |
| The color-shape task | Miyake and Friedman (2012) | Adults | Reactive Task switching |
| Verbal fluency | Delis et al. (2001) | 8–89 years old (norm) | Spontaneous |
| The Creature Counting | Manly et al. (2001) | Children aged 6 to 12 years old (norm) | Reactive Per block |
| Fluidity of drawings | Korkman et al. (2012) | Children aged 5 to 16 years and 11 months (norm) | Spontaneous |
| Categorization | Korkman et al. (2012) | Children aged 7 to 16 years and 11 months (norm) | Spontaneous |
| Innovation paradigm | Karmiloff-Smith (1990) | Children | Spontaneous |
| Drawing of a man starting with the foot | Baldy (2010) | Children | Spontaneous |
1.3.1.2. Indirect assessments
Several questionnaires allow for the indirect assessment of cognitive flexibility. One of the first to be proposed was the Cognitive Flexibility Scale (Martin and Ruben 1995). This scale consists of 12 items, to which the participant responds using a five-point Likert scale. Example of an item: “I am willing to work on problems that require a creative solution”.
The next three correspond to three versions of the Behavioral Assessment of Executive Functions Inventory, depending on the population. These three scales were constructed on an ecological basis and propose to evaluate the consequences of executive deficits in daily life, by adapting the situations to the three age groups targeted (preschoolers, children/adolescents, adults).
The BRIEF-A (Behavioral Assessment of Executive Function