Cognitive Flexibility

Question 1

what is cognitive flexibility?

Answer 1

• ability to switch from one way of thinking to another
• Foundations from working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC)
• Appears to develop later than both WM and IC

Question 2

Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST)

Answer 2

• frontal lobe focused and tests cognitive flexibility
• have to learn rule for sorting cards through guess and check
• examiners tell you if you made a mistake or got it right
• they change the after a certain # of trials, but they don’t tell you it changed
• frontal lobe patients are more likely to continue using the old rule (perseveration)

Question 3

Neuroimaging of WCST

Answer 3

• wanted to examine cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control in the brain while looking at activity during a tasks that require either CF or IC
• conducted meta analysis
• found shared mental mechanisms in the frontal lobe required for both
• shows there are common neural mechanisms involved in IC and CF

Question 4

Dimensional Card Change Sort Task (DCCS)

Answer 4

• child-friendly version of the WCST
• start with the rule being sorting by colour
• teach them the new rule of sorting by shape
• in test phase, stat with colour rule, switch to shape rule
• there are conditions that change the type of shape, change the colour, and change both shape and colour
• these look at how you can take rules and apply it to new context
• add an abstract rule: border = colour rule
  no border = shape rule

Question 5

Results of Dimensional Card Change Sort Task (DCCS)

Answer 5

• kids do really well with the colour rule
• increased rate of errors when asked to shift to shape rule, continue using old rule
• really struggle with the abstract rule because they have to remember what the border indicates

Question 6

Perseverative behaviour

Answer 6

repetitive or continuous engagement in a particular action, thought, or activity, even when it is no longer appropriate or beneficial

Question 7

Water Jug Task

Answer 7

• tests cognitive flexibility
• starts with 3 jars with diff amounts of water and asks you to get a certain amount of water in one of the jars in the fewest moves as possible
• can map response trajectories based on 1st move
• left DLPFC patients seem to take a circular and repetitive approach and don’t consider other options even when they are wrong
• they seem to struggle thinking flexibly

Question 8

Verbal fluency and PFC patients

Answer 8

• ask you to generate as many examples from a given category as possible
• most people use retrieval strategies to pull examples from memory, helps them generate more examples
• patients with frontal lobe damage may demonstrate impaired verbal fluency, they generate fewer examples than expected
• when the patients are provided with retrieval strategies, there performance improves to the level of people with no damage
• demonstrates that people with PFC damage have difficulty spontaneously using retrieval strategies to remember things

Question 9

Theory of Mind (ToM)

Answer 9

understanding that others have perspectives, thoughts, and feelings that may differ from one’s own

Question 10

Sally Anne Task and Theory of Mind

Answer 10

• told a story
• Sally places her marble in basket, then leaves
• Anne moves Sally’s marble to the drawer, Sally re- enters
• asked where Sally would look for the marble
• if you don’t engage ToM, might say Sally would look in the dresser (fail to account that Sally didn’t see Anne move it even though you did)

Question 11

second order representations

Answer 11

• understand what others believe about what someone else believes
• what another person might think or expect
• individuals with ASD have difficulty forming these

Question 12

Theory of mind and individuals with ASD

Answer 12

• Temporal parietal junction (TPJ) has been found to engage significantly in both sides of the brain for tasks requiring theory of mind and second-order representations
• ASD individuals do not appear to utilize the right TPJ
• the less active this area is during theory of mind, the more severe ASD symptoms are

Question 13

Gaze selection

Answer 13

Strong bias to attend to the eyes automatically

Question 14

Joint attention and learning

Answer 14

• can help teach a child to identify an object by looking at it and saying what it is called
• the child will look where you look and pair the visual and auditory info

Question 15

Altered gaze selection in ASD

Answer 15

• individuals with ASD spend most of their time looking at the mouth
• they spend a lot less time looking at the eyes