Poster #2 - How Strongly is Cognitive Flexibility Underpinned by Domain-General Skills in Early Childhood? A Meta-Analytic Approach

• In Event: Poster Session 12

Abstract

Cognitive flexibility (CF) can be described as a skill that allows us to update our goal-oriented thoughts and actions in response to changes in the environment or a task (Chevalier et al., 2012). CF is important because it predicts favorable developmental outcomes during preschool years, such as sophisticated emotional understanding (Wang et al., 2021), advanced theory of mind skills (Marcovitch et al., 2015), and enhanced academic performance (Blair & Razza, 2007).
Developments in CF are known to be underpinned by improvements in a range of domain-general skills (Carroll et al., 2016). The most important of those skills are attention, representational abilities, working memory, and inhibitory control. Attentional and representational abilities are likely to underpin CF because being able to label a stimulus or being able to attend to the relevant part of a stimulus can result in stronger mental representation of key task information (Marcovitch & Zelazo, 2009) that helps children better control their behavior and update their goal-orientation (Kuhn et al., 2016). In addition, working memory and inhibitory control underpin CF because being able to maintain information related to current goals and being able to suppress non-relevant or no-longer relevant goals help children better update their behavior (Blakey et al., 2016).
However, although existing studies have acknowledged the range of factors influencing the development of CF, the strength of these relationships are not yet quantitatively synthesized. In addition, we still know very little about which of those abilities has the greatest influence on the development of flexible goal-oriented behavior across different age groups during early childhood.
To address these gaps, in the current study, we conducted a systematic review and a meta-analysis of the studies investigating the relationship between CF and the domain-general skills supporting CF by using the Web of Science. We included five keywords and their variants, such as cognitive flexibility (and e.g., goal-oriented behavior), working memory (and e.g., maintaining), inhibitory control (and e.g., suppressing), attention (and e.g., attention control), and representational abilities (and e.g., language). After duplicates are removed, the combination of those keywords yielded 3943 studies that offer a relationship between flexible goal-oriented behavior and attention, representational abilities, working memory, and inhibitory control. We are currently screening the 3943 hits with specific inclusion criteria. That is, we will include studies that (i) measure CF and one or more of the domain-general skills associated with CF, (ii) report the relationship between CF and those skills without any covariates, and (iii) report the sample size and mean age of the participants. We will also run backward and forward referencing and contact with corresponding authors of the selected studies to ask for unpublished studies. We plan to finish the meta-analysis by the end of December 2022.
By conducting this meta-analysis, we aim to offer a more precise approach to explain the skills supporting CF during early childhood. This would help intervention research better focus on particular skill(s) in order to improve flexible goal-oriented behavior across different age groups.

Authors

• Yesim Yavaslar Dogru, Karabuk University
  Presenting Author

• Onur Cem Dogru