Is Cognitive Flexibility Equivalent to Shifting? Investigating Cognitive Flexibility in Multiple Domains

This exploratory study tests whether cognitive flexibility reflects a single general mechanism across domains or is domain-specific. Two hundred twenty-one participants (United States and Romania; mean age 19.52 years) completed online tasks from four domains requiring flexible responding: language (Remote Associates Test), mathematics (algebraic problems with and without shortcut opportunities), perception (ambiguous figures), and executive functions (set shifting via an adapted Dots–Triangles task). Math anxiety was also measured. Partial correlations across tasks (controlling for country) were few and small, and factor analysis revealed no common overarching factor; the most notable shared factor was speed of processing for math and language response times. Shifting did not underlie flexibility across domains. While replication is needed, results suggest that set shifting does not exhaust the notion of flexibility across cognitive domains.

Thea Ionescu, Robert L. Goldstone, Doris Rogobete, Mihaela Taranu