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Can we really talk about measuring flexibility? What are we really measuring?

As with all executive functions, the measurement of pure flexibility seems unattainable. Regardless of the type of assessment chosen, there is no 100% guarantee that no other cognitive process is involved in a situation that is supposed to measure flexibility.

Therefore, we should say that a flexibility task predominantly assesses or involves flexibility to a greater extent than other executive functions, or even other cognitive processes, rather than suggesting that only flexibility is measured in this test. For example, the Trail Making Test (TMT) (Reitan and Wolfson 1993), in which we have to switch from processing a sequence of letters to processing a sequence of numbers, requires flexibility, but also inhibition, because in order to switch to the sequence of numbers, we must inhibit the sequence of letters.