Cognitive flexibility in preschoolers: the role of representation activation and maintenance
Nicolas Chevalier1, Agnès Blaye
1Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, University of Provence, France. nicolas.chevalier@univ-provence.fr
Abstract:
Preschoolers' lack of cognitive flexibility has often been attributed to perseverative processing. This study investigates alternative potential sources of difficulty such as deficits in activating previously ignored information and in maintaining currently relevant information. In Experiment 1, a new task tapping attentional switching was designed to isolate the difficulty of overriding an initial representation, that is, perseverative processing ('Perseveration' version), and the difficulty of activating a previously ignored representation, that is, activation deficit ('Activation-deficit' version). Three-year-olds' performance suggested that inflexibility may primarily stem from an activation deficit. Control experiments confirmed that the difficulty of the 'Activation-deficit' version could not be attributed to the effect of attraction to novelty. In Experiment 2, 'distraction' errors, alleged to reflect a failure to maintain a relevant representation, and 'perseverative' errors were distinguished. The results highlighted the important role of representation maintenance in flexibility. The present study indicates that preschoolers' lack of cognitive flexibility is multi-determined and prompts us to reconsider the role of perseveration.
Related Concept Videos
Piaget's Stage 2 of Cognitive Development
Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development from Childhood into Adulthood
Schemata: Building Blocks of Knowledge
Schemata...
Revisionist Views of Adolescent and Adult Cognition
Piaget's Stage 3 of Cognitive Development
Conservation and Constancy of Quantity
A significant cognitive milestone in the concrete...
Information Processing Approach
Cognitivism
Previously dominated by behaviorism, which prioritized observable behaviors and largely ignored mental processes, psychology transformed in the 1950s. Cognitive psychologists argue that understanding how we think and process information is...


