The definition of cognitive flexibility remains debated in the literature. Some refer to flexibility as a general shifting ability. Others argue that it is a context-dependent skill. For others, flexibility is a dimensional construct including reactive flexibility and spontaneous flexibility. To help decide between these views, we analyzed the performances of first-graders across four flexibility tasks. Two tasks focused on reactive flexibility (rule-shifting and verbally-cued-shifting), and two targeted spontaneous flexibility (role-shifting and divergent thinking). Three additional executive tasks investigated the contribution of inhibition, working memory, and processing speed. Significant — though moderate — positive correlations emerged between all but one of the pairs of flexibility tasks. Besides, executive functions were not found to systematically correlate with any measure of flexibility. Furthermore, confirmatory factorial analyses failed to identify a unique or bi-dimensional structure of flexibility. Taken together, these results did not provide evidence for a domain-general ability. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Because of its importance in academic achievement, especially in mathematics, training cognitive flexibility at school is a major issue. The present research investigates the effectiveness of a school-based intervention to improve proportion arithmetic problem solving. The study was conducted with 5th graders of 10 classes from 5 high-priority education schools in the Paris region. Students of the control and experimental groups took part in 8 learning sessions about proportion problem solving. The experimental group’s training focused on comparing and flexibly categorizing the problems in the hopes to help students achieve a deeper understanding of proportion problems. Results show that training flexible categorization allowed the experimental group to progress more than the control group, in both categorization and solving tasks. The educational implications of our results are discussed.

The predominant view concerning determinants ofanalogical retrieval is that it is preferentially guided by superficialcues. In order to test the cognitive plausibility of a structuralsimilarities-based retrieval, we constructed a story-recall task inwhich life-like scenarios shared structural correspondences. InExperiment 1, we showed that such structural similarities induceretrievals when the participant had several source candidatesituations sharing superficial similarities with the target cue.Experiment 2 was designed to test whether the encoding wassufficiently oriented on structural similarities to drive retrievals,even if the participants possess only one source candidate situationwith superficial matches in memory. The results of the two presentexperiments lead us to conclude that in some contexts, abstractencoding induces a superiority of structural similarities oversuperficial ones in retrieval. Further implications for analogicalretrieval approaches are discussed.

In this study, we test the possibility that real-life events induce anabstract category activation in a way that permits structurally-basedretrievals. We used a free-recall reminding paradigm whereparticipants had to report any memory that come to mind when facedwith a target cue embodying a familiar concept. This methodallowed us to consider the retrievals of any analog that shares ameaningful structural similarity in the participants’ own eyes.Results revealed that most participants predominantly retrievedSuperficially Dissimilar Analogs (SDAs) rather than SuperficiallySimilar Disanalogs (SSDs). Interestingly, retrievals of SDAs werepreponderant over retrievals of Superficially Similar Analogs(SSAs). These data suggest that familiar abstract knowledge mayhave a more important role in promoting abstract encoding andstructurally-based retrievals than it was supposed to.

This study investigates whether the ERPs of 4-years-olds in response to verbal overextensions reflect the encoding of actions through abstract categories. Participants were presented with images of actions (e.g. peeling an orange) while hearing a sentence containing a conventional verb (e.g. peeling), an approximative verb (e.g. undressing), a superficially related verb (e.g. pressing) or a pseudoverb (e.g. rauging). The N400 for approximative verbs significantly differed from the pseudoverb condition, but not from the conventional verb condition. In contrast, the N400 for superficially related verbs was significantly greater than for conventional verbs, but no significant difference was found with the pseudoverb condition. These results confirm our hypothesis that encoding mainly focuses on general categories (e.g. taking of an envelope). The implications of the findings are discussed regarding the conceptual organization of preschoolers and their analogical abilities.

A previous research by Raynal et al. (2021) has demonstrated that unconventional verb extensions based on abstract similarities (i.e. semantic approximations) elicited a reduced N400 compared to pseudoverbs in preschoolers. Whereas this result reveals young children’s analogical abilities, the current study aims to shed light on the specificity of mature metaphorical processing. To do so, the design of the previous research was replicated with adults. Participants saw images of actions (e.g., peeling an orange) followed by an auditory presentation of sentences containing either a conventional verb (e.g., peeling), an approximate verb (e.g., undressing), a superficially related verb (e.g., pressing) or a pseudoverb (e.g., rauging). We found that approximate verbs elicited a strong N400 response, followed by a reduced Late Negative Component (LNC) compared to pseudoverbs. These findings suggest that mature metaphorical reasoning involves a category violation followed by a reinterpretation process allowing one to recategorize the source and the target concepts through a common abstract concept.