Читать книгу Cognitive Flexibility - Evelyne Clement - Страница 14

Direct assessments are often less used by practitioners than by researchers, due to the greater material and temporal cost than for indirect assessments. However, there are several batteries of executive function assessments that include measures that can be likened to measures of cognitive flexibility, which have the advantage of providing useful calibrations for practitioners.

The Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch) (Manly et al. 2001), which assesses the attentional abilities of children aged 6 to 12 years, includes the Creature Counting subtest, which can be used to assess cognitive flexibility. In this test, the task is to switch from counting up to the creature to counting down based on explicit visual cues (arrows indicating the counting direction). If the arrow points up, count upwards, but if the arrow points down, count backwards. This test involves flexibly switching from one process to another several times during the test.

Another battery that includes possible flexibility assessments is the developmental neuropsychological assessment, second edition (NEPSY II) (Korkman et al. 2012), intended for children aged 5 to 16 years and 11 months. This battery includes the drawing fluency subtest (also usable for children aged 5 to 16 years and 11 months), in which the child is asked to connect dots in different ways by drawing lines in a limited time. Flexibility is assessed here by the child’s ability to produce different “drawings” for each item and to produce as many as possible within the time limit. As the name implies, this task is also often not considered a flexibility task, but a fluency task.

A second subtest of the NEPSY II could be related to a measure of flexibility: it is the categorization subtest that can be used for children aged 7 to 16 years and 11 months. In this subtest, the child must produce categories to sort cards showing pictures that can be grouped in different ways. For example, the cards show animals of different sizes (large versus small), on different colored backgrounds (blue versus yellow), etc. The child is given an initial categorization by the adult and is then asked to produce others. This subtest can be used to assess cognitive flexibility, as it involves producing several different sorting actions for the same material.

We can also mention a verbal fluency test that can be used to measure flexibility (spontaneous flexibility in particular): the switching part of the verbal fluency test of the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS) (Delis et al. 2001). This battery can assess the executive functions of participants aged 8 to 89. One of the subtests can also be used as a measure of flexibility: the switching part of verbal fluency. After the fluency part, where the person has to give as many words as possible on the basis of a semantic or phonological primer, the person is asked to alternate the propositions between two different semantic categories.

These four subtests could therefore all be considered as assessing, or at least partly involving, cognitive flexibility, but none of the four are explicitly described as such, and to our knowledge, there is no cognitive or executive test battery that includes an assessment of cognitive flexibility named as such.