Читать книгу Cognitive Flexibility - Evelyne Clement - Страница 15

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