Livespan Development in Cognitive Flexibility: Components of Flexibility and Their Relations To Language and Working Memory

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The most important goal of research on cognitive development is to understand how it changes across the lifespan and to identify possible sources causing these changes. One major dimension underlying lifespan cognitive development is cognitive flexibility. It refers to a number of abilities, such as selecting among multiple task goals as well as flexibly switching between them. Little is known about how cognitive flexibility develops. Thus, our aim is to further our understanding of how cognitive flexibility changes across the lifespan and mechanisms underlying these changes. To achieve these ends, we will integrate methods and concepts used in traditional childhood developmental research and cognitive aging. In order to better understand lifespan development of cognitive flexibility and its relation to language and working memory processes, the research program will include three steps. First, we will rely on the expertise of the German and the French team with different age groups and experimental paradigms. We will design a unified method to study cognitive flexibility that can be applied to a broad age range, including preschoolers and very old people. Moreover, we will document lifespan changes in components of cognitive flexibility (goal setting and switching in Exp. 1a) and of components of the switching process (activation and perseveration in Exp. 1b). Second, we will examine whether increased working memory load influences cognitive flexibility and its development. Memory load will be manipulated via the degree of cue transparency in Experiment 2a. In addition, we are interested in the interaction between the increase of working memory load and the use of language (e.g., labeling the next task goal) to enhance cognitive flexibility (Exp. 2b). Finally, we will run two experiments to determine whether the content of verbal labeling (labeling task goals or stimuli) supports cognitive flexibility differently in childhood and old age (Exp. 3a and 3b). All in all, these series of experiments will significantly advance our knowledge of cognitive flexibility. Such understanding is crucial to explain many cognitive phenomena such as attention, memory, thought and action.