Executive function: Flexible thinking

“When your child is asking questions, this is an invitation for flexible thinking. The child wants to know why something is occurring in a certain way and you have an opportunity to explain it in multiple ways, which is teaching the child that there are different ways to look at the same problem.”

Dr. Stuart Marcovitch, Department of Psychology, UNC Greensboro

Have you ever played “hot/cold” with your child? It’s good for a laugh, particularly when a child can’t find something in plain sight. But it’s also great at teaching young children flexible thinking, or the ability to adapt to change. As they are searching for the lost item, they are listening to directions and staying flexible when they have to change course.

In this series on executive function, we’ve been looking at ways to help our children build these skills, which include working memory, impulse control and cognitive flexibility. These mental tasks take practice and must be learned and relearned. All the while, you’re laying the foundation for school-age success. Joining Host Jessica Rolph to explain the neuroscience behind flexible thinking is Dr. Stuart Marcovitch, a professor in the Department of Psychology at UNC Greensboro.

Transcript:

Measuring a child’s cognitive flexibility

Jessica: It’s so great being here with you. So talk to us, how do you measure a child’s cognitive flexibility in your lab? 

Stuart: We have several ways of doing it, but the most popular way to do it in the field is through a card game that was popularized by my graduate advisor, Dr. Phil Zelazo. In this game, we show children cards of a specific color and shape, say a red star or a blue circle, and we have them sort the cards based on one of those dimensions, say color. So all the red cards go in one place, all the blue cards go in another place. And to help them, we show them a target card that matches on one dimension from each card. So we have a red star and a blue circle, we show them a red circle, so they’re putting all the red stars with the red circle and all the blue cards go together as well. We do that five or six times and children at a very young age are very good at this. They’re very good at sorting cards based on that first dimension.

The flexible thinking comes in when after five or six trials we change to the other dimension. So we started with color, now we ask them to sort by shape. So now the stars have to go with the stars. The circles have to go with the circles. But previously, they were doing it by color, and we find that three years of age and at the early four, they have a lot of trouble with this. They’re unable to flexibly switch from the first dimension to the second dimension. And what’s interesting is if you ask them, “Well, where does the card go?” They’ll point to the right box. They actually know the answer. But when you ask them to perform the behavior, they stick to their well-learned habit and are unable to switch flexibly from one to the other.

Jessica: That’s so interesting. We had heard of this study. We put a set of these cards with shape and color in our kit for the end of two-year-olds, in thinking about how to help them develop their flexible thinking skills. And so, they’ll sort by color, then they’ll sort by shape and have to code-switch between the two. So maybe we put it in a little early, but we’ve got a lot of very bright children here at Lovevery, and so we wanted to make sure that they were presented with the right kind of challenge.

Stuart: Well, what’s fascinating about that is that, at that age they should be able to sort by the first dimension. And some parents come into our lab and they find that their children have trouble and they’re concerned about it. And if the child was seven, I’d be concerned. A two-year-old, a three-year-old that was having trouble, that’s actually a very good thing because what they’re learning is to create a habit. Part of flexible thinking is moving away from your habit into another sort of way of thinking. But the creation of habit is also a very important skill, and that seems to be what we prioritize early on in life. We create the habits, then we learn the flexible thinking to move away from the habit.

Flexible thinking and routines

Jessica: Fascinating. So maybe that’s a case for why routines are so important in early childhood, so you can start to understand also what’s different. So you get comforted in the habit of the routine. Can you build on this at all? 

Stuart: Absolutely. A very popular parenting technique is to keep things as routinized as possible so the children know exactly what to expect, and that’s precisely what you should be doing for younger children. They want these things done in a certain order and they feel very uncomfortable when that order is violated. So you want to have your dinner, followed by your playtime, followed by your brushing your teeth, followed by your bedtime and all the routines that go with that. It’s only at a slightly older age, maybe end of four, five, six where it’s kinda fun to mix up that routine because that enables you to practice your flexible thinking.

Jessica: And so, what might that look like? Talk to me about how we can encourage our children to engage in that flexible thinking in an everyday routine.

Stuart: There are many ways to do this. Really pointing out to children how items can take on different roles, that’s a very useful thing. So if you’re talking with your child and you see a tree or something and say, “Oh, this is a tree. See how it creates shade? See how animals can climb on the tree?” And show different aspects of the tree, just a natural conversation, that’s a great way for children to learn that items take on many roles. So different ways of talking about everyday items is a great way to practice flexibility. Another great way would be just to play games with your children.

Many games for children of this age are intended to test their flexibility. One of my favorite games growing up was the game, Crazy Eights, where you would have a playing card and your job was to either match the card based on its number or based on its suit and you go back and forth. So you have a seven of hearts, you either put a seven or a heart. So you have to either think in the world of numbers or think in the world of suits and go back and forth. These are great games you can play with children even as young as four. They may need a little help from you as you play it, but they will start practicing their skills in that way.

Flexibility with other cognition skills

Jessica: And does the science show that if you play these games in a specific way, so the game that we included, for example, in the end of our two-year-old play kits, or the example that you just described, does that brain pathway of flexibility of being able to do the game also translate into the other aspects of cognition? 

Stuart: Yeah. We find that executive function, this ability to manage your thought and control your behavior, really seems to be related to anything that seems to be important in development. It seems to be a real general skill. And there is evidence that if you practice your executive function in one domain, it does carry over to other domains. One thing that we’ve been doing in our lab, is we’ve been testing children on executive function skills and seeing how they relate to their peers. If their peer bumps into them, those with high executive function can understand that that might have been an accident, those with lower executive function kind of assume the child did it on purpose. So we have these types of things going on where executive function seems to relate to all sorts of skills, social and emotional skills that are developing in the young child.

Jessica: And that is, I guess, an example of flexible thinking, of, “This child could have bumped me on purpose or it could have been something else. It could have been an accident or something that they were focused on themselves and didn’t realize.” So I think that this is a perfect example of how this kind of flexible thinking shows up in so many aspects of life. Can you give a few more examples of how you’ve seen frankly a lack of flexible thinking? What does that look like? And then how can you enhance and help them gain more flexibility? 

Stuart: Normally, when we talk about, say a lack of cognitive flexibility, it is within a range. It’s typically due to some kind of lack of maturity that will be overcome. This child for whatever reason is taking a little longer to get the skill but they will get the skill. Where it becomes really concerning is that these functions seem to be in play with, say, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. These children seem to be very low on executive function. They have a lot of trouble controlling their behavior which is why they’re so hyperactive and why they switch from one thing to another very quickly without persisting and focusing. So that’s where we see some real issues of the lack of executive function.

But for most children who are behind, they do catch up. It’s actually a rare case to see someone who will spend a lifetime, say, struggling and lacking with such a major deficiency.

How can parents help build cognitive flexibility

Jessica: That’s so encouraging. And what about parents who are really tuning into this concept of executive functioning, how important it is for success in school and life? Understand that we’re born with the capacity to build these skills but that, again, we need role modeling. We need practice. What kind of “curriculum” can you suggest parents engage in around cognitive flexibility for their, say three, four or five-year-old? 

Stuart: The number one thing a parent can do, is spend time with their child. I think what we’re seeing today as a negative, is parents spending less time with their children and the children are engaged today with media, iPhones, iPads, watching too much TV, that sort of thing. Just spending time with your child creates a natural environment where these types of skills can be practiced. When you just talk with your child and your child is asking questions, this is an invitation for flexible thinking. The child wants to know why something is occurring in a certain way and you have an opportunity to explain it and you can explain it in multiple ways, which is teaching the child that there are different ways to answer a question or different ways to look at the same problem.

Any game intended for children… When I was a child the big games were Candy Land or Snakes and Ladders. These games are really intended to move from one rule to another rule in a flexible manner. So, “Oh here’s a ladder, I go up the board. Oh, here’s a snake, I go down the board.” So you’re learning that in different contexts, different cues mean different events. So spending time with your child, having conversations with your child, asking your child what they did that day and most children, say, at four years of old don’t give you enough information, so you tend to prompt them and get them to say more and more things. All this is helping them reflect and consider what they do from a different way so they can explain it better to you.

Jessica: And I loved how you talked about the games and the role modeling from parents and, again, that unplugged time. It is hard to find time right now with modern life. So encouragement for parents to just spend that little extra bit of time in engaging. Offering choice and alternatives to our children, often helps them feel more empowered. That’s a tool that a lot of parents use. How does choice and offering choices help with cognitive flexibility? 

Stuart: Offering children choices is a great cognitive flexibility technique, because it allows the children to consider different alternatives simultaneously. And you can use these choices in many ways. One of my favorite things to recommend to parents is to cook with their children. Involving them in the cooking routine is incredibly good, and then allow them to make choices while they’re helping you out. So you start off by, “Well, what do you want to make for dinner? Do you want to make pizza or a spaghetti?” So right away, there’s a choice, gives the child some empowerment, now they’re involved in the activity. If it’s pizza, they can help press the dough down. They can help spread the tomato sauce. They can see things from different perspectives.

So, “Oh, here’s cheese that’s in a bag. Here’s cheese that’s on the pizza. Oh, the cheese is going to change shape. It’s going to melt when you heat it up.” Another benefit from having children be involved in things like cooking, is we have research that shows that children are more likely to eat what they make. So if you’re concerned about your children’s nutrition, if you have involved them in these choices and in this decision-making, they’re more likely to eat. And it’s mostly because they take some kind of ownership over the choices they make. There’s something very rewarding about having control over your situation. It seems to be a very appealing factor. And if you want to get technical with some of the neuropsychology behind it, we can talk about dopamine transmitters being released. We can talk about other hormonal changes that allow for some kind of reward center. But even from a more simpler point of view, having control over your environment is pleasing. This is why as adults, most of us want that control, and it starts as children.

Being okay with mistakes

Jessica: It’s so interesting you brought up dopamine, because we actually brought it up in the play kit that we sent to you in the book, “Charlie Learns Something New.” And we discussed this concept of feeling that sparkly feeling in my brain when I’m working on a puzzle and I’m working on something that’s hard. We talk often about mistakes in parenting. There’s so many opportunities for children and parents to make mistakes. Why is trial and error so important for developing minds, and how does that relate to dopamine? 

Stuart: I love the fact that you brought that up with parents and children, because most of the time we talk about children making mistakes, but parents make mistakes too. And a lot of parent mistakes end up being really beneficial for development. [chuckle] So mistakes of all types are useful. Basically, the way our brains are wired is that we respond to similar things and we try to force new things into our similar… Into our existing pathways. So one of Jean Piagets’s theories is that you see something new and you force that representation into what already exists. That’s very useful when you’re finding new things, but it doesn’t allow you to learn. What allows you to learn is this realization that what you’re seeing and what you think don’t match up. A mistake has been made.

And not only is that true for learning, that’s true for any artificial intelligence algorithm that’s out there. This is how AI is learning. They’re making mistakes and they’re tweaking themselves in order to not make that mistake in the future. This is how the brain works. This is exactly how neurotransmitters modulate their release mechanisms, is by adjusting to previous mistakes and learning how to do that in the future. So making mistakes is great. A child will not learn without making mistakes. Now that being said, one of the things we like to teach children, say as they get older through preschool, end of four, at five, is to start thinking about things before they’re acting. Starting to reflect, starting to meditate, if you will, on their responses before they actually execute them, in a way simulating what a mistake would be like, and allowing yourself in your head to say, “Oh, if I do this, this will be a mistake, therefore I’ll do something else. Do something correct.” So that’s something that can be taught with time, but only because a child previous to that has made mistakes and has learned that they can fix their behavior after the mistake is made.

Jessica: And then what about, we’re now getting into persistence, but what about making a mistake? Oftentimes, a four-year-old, and this is what we represented in the book, is that this child thought that they had done the puzzle correctly. It looks right, the pieces fit together, but it’s a puzzle based on color, not on shape. And so the child’s older sibling comes in and says, “No, that’s not right. You didn’t do that right.” And then oftentimes children just want to give up or have somebody else do it for them. Talk to me about what’s happening in their brain and how can you build that resilience and that persistence to make a mistake and then want to learn yourself how to overcome.

Stuart: When children work with gains and puzzles, often they’re not playing by the same rules you want them to play by. So they’re trying to just make things fit together, or even will have a narrative that can justify their… What we seem to think are wrong answers. So there’s that aspect to it. As the children learn how to work with the puzzle, they’ll begin to learn what the right answer is, and probably the best way to do that is exactly as it occurs in the storybook. The best way to do that is to have a friendly peer, an older sibling or a parent point out gently how changes can be made like, “Oh, look this is… It’s great what you did here, but what you really want to do is make the light green go next to the dark green.” And that’s how the children will then modify their expectation and do it. Now, the question you asked has a lot to do with frustration. So when a child plays with these games, it does build their self-esteem. And when you tell them they’re incorrect, there is a bit of a blow to the self-esteem of the children.

And some children, not all, but some children react very negatively to this, will not want to play anymore. And that could be a very tricky situation. But in almost all cases, you can convince the child that you can work together to make it a more useful product. And that it would be the approach that we should take. In the book what happens is a wonderful thing, the child gets very frustrated, so the mom takes the child out of context, has a snack with the child, says, “No, you don’t have to tell me what’s wrong, just I want to hug you now, I want to tell you everything’s okay.” And then once the child is calm, the child herself wants to return to the game context and try to figure it out herself and realizes when she does figure it out herself, what a great feeling that is.

And that is actually universally true. This feeling of accomplishing something just beyond your ability for the first time is a release of very, very positive neurotransmitters in your brain that gives you a very, very good feeling. It really is equivalent to many of the pharmaceutical highs that we talk about. So it’s very rewarding for the child to do that, and they want to feel that again and again. This is why many children continue with this curiosity or want to play more and more puzzles and more and more games, or why at a certain age they start getting bored, once they know how to solve something. They want to be challenged into something that they haven’t done before.

Jessica: Yeah. It seems like you’ve read, “Charlie Learns Something New“ because you just told us this arc of the story which is so great. I think that providing children that right amount of challenge is hard. As parents, it’s hard to know and collaborate with your child, where do they need that incremental step up, but not too hard where they give up and it becomes overwhelming. As a parent, I’m constantly trying to figure that out.

What else do you want to tell parents? You are here, you have an audience, we’re all listening, you know so much. What else have we not covered that you want to share? 

Stuart: Well, I think the most important thing to get across is that there are really two levels of executive function to think about. There is getting your basic skills in order, and then there’s perfecting it to be like an expert. A lot of what we parents are trying to do are that second part. So you have children who have fairly okay flexible thinking, and then you want to refine it so that they’re excellent at it. And then the hope then is that these children will be academically successful, be popular with their peers and able to be more creative and able to do things in an excellent manner.

That’s kind of what a high-achieving parent’s goal is. But at a whole other level, there’s this massive concern, “Well, can I even get my child to that basic executive function?” For those parents I want you just not to worry. Children in their natural environment will learn these basic skills. You don’t have to panic, you don’t have to worry about it. The best thing you can do is spend time with your children, talk to them, ask them questions, have them ask you questions, involve them in your activities. That will get them the basic executive function to start as a base for all their future learning. Once that’s in place, then you could start playing, start manipulating their environment in ways so you can have them excel to a high level.

Jessica: And we’re here for both stages of parenthood. We’re here for comforting you at the baseline and helping give you that nudge. And then, your advice around spending time. But also there is an environment that is helpful to grow little minds and grow abilities around executive functioning. And so our mission is to try and help parents create that environment, that optimal environment. So thank you so much, Stuart. It’s been wonderful being with you today.

Stuart: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed being here.

Here are my takeaways from the conversation:

1. While routines help children know what to expect, you can start mixing up the routine a bit at age 4. It gives your child an opportunity to practice flexible thinking. Maybe you brush teeth and then take a bath… instead of the other way around.
2. Games like the Lovevery Reach for the Stars Matching Cards — where you sort by shape, and then code switch to sort the same cards by color — are great for building flexible thinking.
3. Offering children choices is another great cognitive flexibility technique, because it allows them to consider various alternatives simultaneously. Stuart recommends offering choices while cooking with your child: Do you want to cut the carrots into rounds or slice them into sticks?
4. Welcome mistakes in your home — both from children and adults. We learn by reviewing our mistakes and adjusting our behavior accordingly. Children start to reflect on previous mistakes around the age of 4. 
5. The release of neurotransmitters that comes with accomplishing something just beyond your ability is a great feeling. Give your child as many opportunities to get that feeling of success by offering gentle support when they’re faced with a problem, rather than solving it for them.

Learn more on our Lovevery blog.