by Meghan Fitzgerald
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
― Albert Einstein
While we might not think about cognitive flexibility in our day to day life, it is an essential skill that we call upon every day to help us navigate and make sense of the world. Cognitive flexibility, also known as flexible thinking, is the ability to shift one’s attention as the demands of the environment or task change. This involves being able to take different perspectives, shift priorities and redirect attention from one thing to another. The quicker you’re able to shift from one perspective to another, the greater your cognitive flexibility.
Actually, obtaining greater cognitive flexibility helps children learn, both in and out of school. The ability to easily shift perspective and recognize when the rules change allows us to think in novel ways, act creatively and solve problems. Key academic skills like reading, writing and math are also easier to learn when we can think in flexible ways. For example, kids need to think flexibly about letters to understand that they can have different sounds. They need that cognitive flexibility to grasp the many exceptions and complexities to the rules of grammar. And they need it in math to understand that there’s more than one way to solve a problem.
How can we tell that young children are working on cognitive flexibility?
Building this capacity starts in infancy. We see babies, working on simply shifting attention from one thing to another— these are the roots of cognitive flexibility to come. As children get older, we start to see them better able to adjust to the shifting rules in a game and better able to take different perspectives. They also get smoother at transitions in general, increasingly able to identify not only what is the most important thing on which to focus, but better able to let their focus move from one thing to another.
How can we support cognitive flexibility?
It is not the strongest of the species, nor the most intelligent who survive, but the one most responsive to change.
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