Professeure Associée à l'Université de Babeș-Bolyai

Responsable de l'équipe Flexibility and Grounded Cognition
Developmental Psychology Lab, Psychology Department

One of the most highly-praised human characteristic, cognitive flexibility is also one of the most poorly-understood concepts in current psychological research. At least four different research traditions present cognitive flexibility in different ways, i.e. as set-shifting, as a measure in creativity tests, as linked to openness to experience, or as a property of various cognitive processes. After perusing all these, one cannot help but ask which one is the “true” flexibility.
     My main endeavor so far was to understand this concept. I have started from investigating flexible categorization, and arrived to conceptualizing cognitive flexibility as a property of the cognitive system and as part of the variability-stability-flexibility pattern. In this talk I will offer arguments for this new conceptualization while outlining the need for the critical analysis of the concepts that we use. I will also present some recent data that investigate flexibility in four domains, namely mathematics, language, perception, and executive function.
     As the quest for the nature of cognitive flexibility is only now gaining momentum outside the realm of executive functions, I hope that this talk will elicit fruitful discussions about how to better understand this important quality that helps us create, adapt, and survive.