Demystifying cognitive flexibility: Implications for clinical and developmental neuroscience

By Dina R. Dajani, Lucina Q. Uddin. Trends in Neurosciences, 2015

896 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cognitive flexibility, the readiness with which one can selectively switch between mental processes to generate appropriate behavioral responses, develops in a protracted manner and is compromised in several prevalent neurodevelopmental disorders. It is unclear whether cognitive flexibility arises from neural substrates distinct from the executive control network, or from the interplay of nodes within this and other networks. Here we review neuroimaging studies of cognitive flexibility, focusing on set shifting and task switching. We propose that more consistent operationalization and study of cognitive flexibility is required in clinical and developmental neuroscience. We suggest that an important avenue for future research is the characterization of the relationship between neural flexibility and cognitive flexibility in typical and atypical development.

Subfields: Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09b7a99920ee710821f6a8e9813ded52ff1418f6

Citations in the corpus

• Multiple task-demands flexibly optimize neural geometry in human ventral temporal cortex (2026, unknown): “A hallmark of human intelligence is our ability to perform multiple, including entirely new tasks - even when based solely on verbal instructions 1,2 .”