Self-reported nutritional status, executive functions, and cognitive flexibility in adults

Objectives. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between nutrition status, executive cognitive functions, and cognitive flexibility; and to analyze the role of gender, age, and nutrition status in the prediction of executive cognitive functions and cognitive flexibility in a sample of Iranian adults. Background. This study is based on the hierarchy of needs, health beliefs, developmental, cognitive and psychophysiological conceptualizations of nutrition and their plausible influences on human cognitive functions and cognitive flexibility. Materials and Methods. The randomly selected sample consisted of 200 adult participants (M=99 and F=101) from Eghlid City, the north of Fars province, Iran. A demographic questionnaire, the Nutrition Assessment Inventory (NAI), the Amsterdam Executive Function Inventory (AEFI), and the Cognitive Flexibility Scale (CFS) were used. Results. Findings showed significant positive relationships between healthy nutrition (diet-oriented nutrition and high fat foods subscales of Nutrition Assessment Inventory), the evaluation coping subscale, and the total score of Cognitive Flexibility Inventory. In addition, age and nutritional status had a significant impact with regards to predicting cognitive flexibility and executive cognitive functions. Conclusions. Given the significant positive relationship between nutrition status and cognitive flexibility, and the role of gender and nutrition status on executive cognitive functions and mental flexibility, this study may offer beneficial approaches for nutrition and cognitive health programs by clinicians and health education professionals

Cultural variation in cognitive flexibility reveals diversity in the development of executive functions

Cognitive flexibility, the adaptation of representations and responses to new task demands, improves dramatically in early childhood. It is unclear, however, whether flexibility is a coherent, unitary cognitive trait, or is an emergent dimension of task-specific performance that varies across populations with divergent experiences. Three-to 5-year-old English-speaking U.S. children and Tswana-speaking South African children completed two distinct language-processing cognitive flexibility tests: the FIM-Animates, a word-learning test, and the 3DCCS, a rule-switching test. U.S. and South African children did not differ in word-learning flexibility but showed similar age-related increases. In contrast, U.S. preschoolers showed an age-related increase in rule-switching flexibility but South African children did not. Verbal recall explained additional variance in both tests but did not modulate the interaction between population sample (i.e., country) and task. We hypothesize that rule-switching flexibility might be more dependent upon particular kinds of cultural experiences, whereas word-learning flexibility is less cross-culturally variable

Cognitive flexibility predicts early reading skills

International audienceAn important aspect of learning to read is efficiency in accessing different kinds of linguistic information (orthographic, phonological, and semantic) about written words. The present study investigates whether, in addition to the integrity of such linguistic skills, early progress in reading may require a degree of cognitive flexibility in order to manage the coordination of this information effectively. Our study will look for evidence of a link between flexibility and both word reading and passage reading comprehension, and examine whether any such link involves domain-general or reading-specific flexibility. As the only previous support for a predictive relationship between flexibility and early reading comes from studies of reading comprehension in the opaque English orthography, another possibility is that this relationship may be largely orthography-dependent, only coming into play when mappings between representations are complex and polyvalent. To investigate these questions, 60 second-graders learning to read the more transparent French orthography were presented with two multiple classification tasks involving reading-specific cognitive flexibility (based on words) and non-specific flexibility (based on pictures). Reading skills were assessed by word reading, pseudo-word decoding, and passage reading comprehension measures. Flexibility was found to contribute significant unique variance to passage reading comprehension even in the less opaque French orthography. More interestingly, the data also show that flexibility is critical in accounting for one of the core components of reading comprehension, namely, the reading of words in isolation. Finally, the results constrain the debate over whether flexibility has to be reading-specific to be critically involved in reading

Affective modulation of cognitive control is determined by performance-contingency and mediated by ventromedial prefrontal and cingulate cortex

Cognitive control requires a fine balance between stability, the protection of an on-going task-set, and flexibility, the ability to update a task-set in line with changing contingencies. It is thought that emotional processing modulates this balance, but results have been equivocal regarding the direction of this modulation. Here, we tested the hypothesis that a crucial determinant of this modulation is whether affective stimuli represent performance-contingent or task-irrelevant signals. Combining functional magnetic resonance imaging with a conflict task-switching paradigm, we contrasted the effects of presenting negative- and positive-valence pictures on the stability/flexibility trade-off in humans, depending on whether picture presentation was contingent on behavioral performance. Both the behavioral and neural expressions of cognitive control were modulated by stimulus valence and performance contingency: in the performance-contingent condition, cognitive flexibility was enhanced following positive pictures, whereas in the nonperformance-contingent condition, positive stimuli promoted cognitive stability. The imaging data showed that, as anticipated, the stability/flexibility trade-off per se was reflected in differential recruitment of dorsolateral frontoparietal and striatal regions. In contrast, the affective modulation of stability/flexibility shifts was mirrored, unexpectedly, by neural responses in ventromedial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices, core nodes of the “default mode” network. Our results demonstrate that the affective modulation of cognitive control depends on the performance contingency of the affect-inducing stimuli, and they document medial default mode regions to mediate the flexibility-promoting effects of performance-contingent positive affect, thus extending recent work that recasts these regions as serving a key role in on-task control processes

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? Cognitive Flexibility Influences Career Decision Making and Related Anxiety

Career indecision is a stage most individuals pass through during their lifetime, but it is often accompanied by anxiety. While anxiety can have a positive influence on decision making by focusing attention and cognitive resources, excess anxiety can disrupt the career decision-making process. Existing literature links anxiety to cognitive flexibility, an individual’s ability to efficiently switch between thoughts and ideas and adapt to evolving situations, with young adults higher in cognitive flexibility typically experiencing less anxiety than their less flexible peers. However, no studies to date have examined cognitive flexibility as it relates to career indecision or career-indecision-related anxiety. This study examines the relationships between cognitive flexibility, career indecision, and anxiety in undergraduate students. 156 undergraduate students (72% female, 91% Caucasian, 63% juniors and seniors) completed an online Qualtrics survey assessing career indecision, career anxiety, cognitive flexibility, and general demographic information including academic trajectory, career confidence, and personal characteristics. The previously documented relationship between career indecision and anxiety was supported, but the discovery that both career indecision and anxiety share significant relationships with cognitive flexibility augments prior research by examining cognitive flexibility in the context of career decision-making. While cognitive flexibility did relate to both career-indecision-related anxiety and career indecision, it did not directly mediate the relationship between these two variables, and once its relationship with career indecision was partialled, it no longer significantly correlated with career-indecision-related anxiety. This suggests cognitive flexibility could serve as a mechanism to promote career decision-making, thereby reducing career-indecision-related anxiety

The Relationship Between Cognitive Flexibility, Coping, and Symptomatology in Psychotherapy

Cognitive flexibility is broadly defined as the ability to shift perspective or approach in order to adapt to changes in the environment. This implies the abilities to generate alternatives and then to implement effective approaches. High cognitive flexibility has been associated with psychological well-being and effective coping, whereas low flexibility, or rigidity, has been linked to several types of psychopathology. The goal of the current study was to provide exploratory evidence of the utility of a brief, self-report measure of cognitive flexibility in identifying relationships to coping strategies, symptomatology, and treatment duration in a clinical setting. A total of 18 individuals seeking treatment at a university-affiliated mental health clinic participated in the study. Participants completed measures of cognitive flexibility and coping styles. Demographic information and data regarding symptomatology and treatment were gathered from client files. Correlational analyses indicated strong positive relationships between aspects of cognitive flexibility and use of problem-focused coping, suggesting that greater ability to generate and implement effective approaches is linked to greater use of pragmatic strategies to improve a situation. Results also indicated a strong positive correlation between the perceived control over challenging situations and duration of previous therapy. However, no relationship was found between flexibility and symptomatology. These exploratory results provide preliminary evidence for the relationship between cognitive flexibility and aspects of mental health in a clinical setting

Towards engineering ontologies for cognitive profiling of agents on the semantic web

Research shows that most agent-based collaborations suffer from lack of flexibility. This is due to the fact that most agent-based applications assume pre-defined knowledge of agents’ capabilities and/or neglect basic cognitive and interactional requirements in multi-agent collaboration. The highlight of this paper is that it brings cognitive models (inspired from cognitive sciences and HCI) proposing architectural and knowledge-based requirements for agents to structure ontological models for cognitive profiling in order to increase cognitive awareness between themselves, which in turn promotes flexibility, reusability and predictability of agent behavior; thus contributing towards minimizing cognitive overload incurred on humans. The semantic web is used as an action mediating space, where shared knowledge base in the form of ontological models provides affordances for improving cognitive awareness

Static and dynamic measures of human brain connectivity predict complementary aspects of human cognitive performance

In cognitive network neuroscience, the connectivity and community structure of the brain network is related to cognition. Much of this research has focused on two measures of connectivity - modularity and flexibility - which frequently have been examined in isolation. By using resting state fMRI data from 52 young adults, we investigate the relationship between modularity, flexibility and performance on cognitive tasks. We show that flexibility and modularity are highly negatively correlated. However, we also demonstrate that flexibility and modularity make unique contributions to explain task performance, with modularity predicting performance for simple tasks and flexibility predicting performance on complex tasks that require cognitive control and executive functioning. The theory and results presented here allow for stronger links between measures of brain network connectivity and cognitive processes.Comment: 37 pages; 7 figure