Psychology

The rapid cognitive development that young children experience had been the focus of interest for many researchers of cognitive functioning. Mainly on gaining an understanding of how the brain develops and acquires the cognitive abilities that children need as they progress along the different stages of development. In terms of cognitive functioning, one that has fascinated most researchers is the study of attention and problem-solving. Children have limited attention span, they are easily distracted and they do poorly at tasks that require them to focus and pay attention for long periods of time (Huitt  Hummel, 2003). This has been considered a normal developmental challenge. On the other hand, the limitation of young childrens attentional skills has provided an understanding of how attentional flexibility is constrained in young children.

Attentional flexibility refers to the ability of the mind to focus on one object or task and shift to another object or task without losing attentional orientation on the first object or task (Wright  Ward, 2008). Attentional flexibility has been viewed as a hallmark of cognitive development, wherein children who demonstrate such skills are cognitively developed and can be able to work with more complex tasks (Guinote, 2007). By being able to shift ones attention, the brain is said to gain plasticity and be able to form additional neural connections (Ferlazzo, Lucido, Di Nocera, Fagioli  Sdoia, 2007).  However, attentional flexibility has not been studied in normally functioning children and outside of its neurological orientation,  and the need to study it further is based on the desire to gain a better understanding of cognitive functioning in normal children and in how it can be enhanced.

This paper explores the current empirical studies on attentional flexibility in young children and its relevance to the development of the child. A discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the presented literature on attentional flexibility provide a synthesis and critique of existing studies. An alternative point of view is also included to expound on how attentional flexibility can be studied more appropriately and with more relevance to the field of developmental psychology.

Summary of Empirical Studies
Stahl and Pry (2005) observed that attentional flexibility had been studied widely among children and adults with learning disabilities or with neurological conditions, but not much has been known about it in normal functioning children. The authors investigated the development of young childrens attentional flexibility by measuring perseverative errors as indicative of the lack of attentional flexibility. The authors used set-shifting tasks to measure attentional flexibility among preschool children aged 1 year and 5 months old to six years old who were enrolled in a preschool program in France.

The set-shifitng tasks involved visual and non-visual tasks that asked the participants to find the object in a series of patterns and shapes. The tasks demonstrated attentional flexibility in the manipulation and responses of the participants, such that when they are able to focus on finding the hidden or shifted object. Perseverative errors were measured in terms of the number of errors that the participant committed after the set task has been shifted. Perseverative errors were assumed to be indicative of the lack of attentional flexibility since the participant was not able to shift from the previous task to the new one.

The results of the experiment showed that there was an observed developmental growth in the  increase of attentional flexibility performance  and a decrease in perseverative errors among the participants. Moreover, it was also found that the youngest participants were more inflexible and the oldest participants demonstrated better flexibility. However, evidence of the basic attentional flexibility abilities was observed even in very young children, such that the youngest participants was able to switch from one response set to the next when there is no long delay and they had visual cues to guide them. Lastly, the researchers found that errors were due to the lack of other cognitive functioning such as an undeveloped working memory and inhibition rather than a lack of attentional flexibility skills. The researchers concluded that there are different levels of attentional flexibility, and this becomes more complex as the child develops.

Young children are said to be experiencing rapid growth and development in their cognitive abilities and functioning, thus it is important to determine at what age such cognitive function begin to emerge and how it is manifested. Blaye and Jacques (2009) believed that higher cognitive functioning such as categorical flexibility occurs in young children and explores the said variable using match to sample tasks that asked children to choose a thematic or taxonomic associate for a given object.

They conducted an experiment to determine the role of conceptual knowledge and executive control in the performance of categorical flexibility. Three to five year old preschoolers were presented with an 18 item match to sample tasks wherein they had to identify the category in which the given object belonged. This was used to demonstrate categorical flexibility, which can only occur when conceptual knowledge and executive control are present.

Blaye and Jacques (2009) found that age is associated with the development of categorical flexibility in the preschool years, specifically between four to five years old. However, they also found that there is a competing developmental progression for conceptual and executive processes wherein younger children demonstrated cognitive flexibility but lacked conceptual knowledge. In order for categorical flexibility to occur, the child must first master the conceptual knowledge of categories and then acquire appropriate executive control skills mainly, cognitive flexibility. The researchers concluded that in order to develop categorical flexibility, the child must be presented with all the categorical concepts for a given object, since the manner of presentation of associates impeded the switch from one category to the next.

Young children acquire knowledge about individual characteristics of a given entity to distinguish it from others that are physically similar to the said object or character. Thus, young children would be able to differentiate one character figure from the rest through its spatiotemporal characteristics. Rhemtulla and Hall (2009) sough to explore whether young children are able to infer the categories of the character figure from its spatiotemporal characteristics. Such flexibility would indicate the presence of cognitive flexibility or the ability to think about one object in terms of its many characteristics and attributes.

The authors conducted three experiments with four and five year old children which accordingly correspond to the age when cognitive flexibility is manifested. In the experiments, the children were presented with a target character, a monkey called Boris and it is matched to a story with another Boris, and a distracter character called Fred. The children were to identify whether the Boris they saw and felt was the same Boris in the story. The series of matching and categorization helped determine the ability of young children to infer individuality of the character from other characters.

The authors concluded that children are able to identify the unique characteristics of the character and to set-aside the general characteristics of the object in order to understand its uniqueness. It was also concluded that children have a general reasoning ability to think about an object in varying conceptual information and categories.

Attentional networks are responsible for the focusing of human attention across separate events and objects. An efficient network would have better ability to focus and shift attention on several tasks without a decline in performance. Waszak and Li (2010) investigated attentional networks among a developmentally represented sample. The aim of the study was to demonstrate the progression of attentional orienting and conflict resolution across ages to find out the differences in attentional networks in young children and those in old age. Attention is a key component of cognitive development in early childhood while attentional deficits later in life causes a drop in performance. It has been found that not many studies have been conducted in this topic. This study specifically adopted a life-span perspective and used a large sample size, a cross-section of participants were selected and was stratified by age and sex. The participants were asked to complete a Posner-type orienting task for the orienting task and an Eriksen-type flanker task for measuring conflict.

Waszak and Li (2010) found that attentional orienting and conflict resolution had different age gradients corresponding to early childhood and aging. Attentional orienting is manifested at around 4 to 5 years old, and it is completed by 10 to 11 years old. Covert orienting was also found to be adult-like by 8 to 10 years old. However, conflict effect was observed to improve across the age groups. The researchers concluded that although attentional orienting declined later in life, the decline is not so much a function of aging but of the deficit of some other cognitive capacity.

Childrens problem-solving skills had been the focus of studies in cognition and learning, and although the old theory of readiness and accommodation says that children first learn and use basic problem-solving skills, nowadays, interests on the different problem-solving strategies children use dominate the field. A study examined the problem-solving skills of young children in different educational levels and age groups (Farrington-Flint, Vanuxem-Cotterill  Stiller, 2009). The researchers aimed to identify the differences in the choice of problem-solving strategies for literacy and arithmetic tasks of preschool children, and also to determine whether the choices change across ages and educational experience.
The participants were 50 British 5 to 7 years old children who were enrolled in level 1 and 2 classes in a suburban area. The children were asked to solve four tasks, addition and subtraction for the arithmetic tasks and reading and spelling for the literacy tasks. In each of the tasks, the accuracy of the response, response time and verbal report of problem-solving strategy was measured.

The researchers found that there are indeed demonstrable age-related progresses in the accuracy of the responses for all of the four tasks. It was also found that children used more problem-solving strategies in the arithmetic tasks than the literacy tasks. Of the most widely used were retrieval, finger modeling and counting for the addition and subtraction tasks and phonological and retrieval strategies were used in reading and spelling tasks. Lastly, the researchers observed that children who were more advanced in their problem-solving skills in reading and spelling were also better at addition and subtraction.

This study found evidence that supported the assumptions of the wave model of problem-solving, where adaptive choice in childrens problem solving strategies indicate that they have access to many strategies. It would also mean that they can shift from one strategy to the next in different problem-solving tasks. And those children often choose the strategies that are associated with greater success.

Discussion
The reviewed studies on attentional flexibility among young children have found one similar result, that is, even young children as early as 4 years old demonstrate attentional flexibility thereby indicating that there are developmental variations of the said ability. Stahl and Pry (2005) were able to observe attentional flexibility among very young children, but it is more evident at the 4 to 5 years of age. It was also observed that very young children committed more perseveration errors in that they had difficulty shifting their attention to a new set or task but that these errors decreased as children grew older. Blaye and Jacques (2009) also found that categorical flexibility or attentional flexibility was evident in the performance of categorization tasks among 4 and 5 year old children. The other researchers also place attentional flexibility in about the same age range (Farrington-Flint, Vanuxem-Cotterill  Stiller, 2009 Rhemtulla  Hall, 2009 Waszak  Li, 2010).

However, this is where the similarities end. The researches on attentional flexibility presented in this paper has inherent conceptual and methodological issues, first is that, there is no single definition of attentional flexibility, second, behaviors that are assumed to manifest attentional flexibility are chosen by the researchers based on their own conceptualization of attentional flexibility which does not form any consensus. Moreover, measuring attentional flexibility through the use of tasks and problem-solving activities have called into question the extent to which such behaviors are influenced by other factors other than attentional flexibility.

In the reviewed studies, attentional flexibility was measured in terms of categorization tasks, set matching tasks, character identity, and problem-solving which involved complex and elaborate experiments and procedures which were taxing to young children. Moreover, the choice of which task will measure what is not clearly discussed in all of the studies.  Thus, it would be difficult to pinpoint what is attentional flexibility and how it is manifested in actual behavior. For example, the study on problem-solving strategies does not explicitly talk about attentional flexibility, but from the process of shifting from one problem-solving strategy to the next can be assumed to be an expression of attentional flexibility.

In the same light, it was also observed that the research on attentional flexibility was more concerned with identifying individual differences, age differences and comparing one group from the other. This are all elementary and basic research designs, and belie the fact that attentional flexibility is a vague concept that is worthy to be studied and investigated but is difficult to quantify and observe.
Also, some researchers reported that a decline in the correlates of attentional flexibility can be explained more fully by the effects of other executive functioning skills such as memory, retrieval, cues and practice-effect. Lastly, there is a need to go back to the conceptualization of attentional flexibility and be able to delineate a more objective and measurable definition of the issue, so that more robust studies and experiments can be conducted.

Future Research
The potential of the human mind remains to be a fascinating subject for most experimental and cognitive psychologists, however, since it has been demonstrated that cognitive development is tied to the biological, physical and psychological development of the individual from birth to old age, it is also important to study the mind along these lines. Children before the age of seven undergo such rapid growth and development that providing the best learning environment and nurturance contributes to optimum development (Santrock, 2008).

Attentional flexibility according to cognitive psychology is a cognitive functioning which allows the mind to focus and shift from one task or object to another and absorbing and processing its characteristics. If a child is able to focus on the identity of the characters on the movie and be able to process information aside from the characters show attentional flexibility. But, attentional flexibility is not only limited to varying tasks but also on making decisions, choosing strategies and evaluating choices. Thus, future studies on attentional flexibility should focus on what it is and how it is manifested.

Young children are difficult to study especially that they have limited vocabulary and understanding of their environment, thus, it is not always possible to observe them unobtrusively while they are performing the tasks or activities designed to measure attentional flexibility. Future research should consider designing a more child-appropriate experiment, where the possible effects of learning, priming and practice would be controlled.

Lastly, future studies on attentional flexibility should take into account that it is a construct that can easily be influenced by other cognitive functions, for example, if the absence of perseveration errors indicated high attentional flexibility, it can also easily be explained by a sharper memory on memory tasks, or a better recall or retrieval of information in set-tasks. In the future, attentional flexibility should be studied as it occurs in daily tasks such as playing with a doll and a playmate at the same time.

Studying attentional flexibility is not a futile exercise, although the vagueness of the concept may be disheartening, there is still the need to understand a phenomenon and a human one at that. Attentional flexibility is real, it is there, but the tools which are used to study it still needs to be refined. The information that attentional flexibility brings to the greater understanding of the working of the human mind and the implications it has on learning and education is reason enough to continue studying it.