About this journal
Advances in Cognitive Psychology (ACP) is an open access, peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all areas and aspects of human cognitive psychology, including, but not limited to, perception, attention, memory, social cognition, and language processing in behavioral, cognitive, psychophysiological, and neuropsychological perspectives, as well as in computer- and modeling-based science. We welcome original empirical and theoretical articles, as well as replications, reports of null findings, and literature reviews. ACP also promotes and encourages open science, pre-registration of study and is a peer community in registered reports (PCI RR) - friendly journal. We are also indexed in a range of major databases, including PubMed, Scopus, JCR, and PsycINFO.
Advances in Cognitive Psychology is co-financed by the Ministry of Education and Science (Ministerstwo Edukacji i Nauki) under the program "Rozwój czasopism naukowych," RCN/SN/0494/2021/1.
Issue 1 Online: 31 March 2023
The Two-Factor Structure of Cognitive Flexibility: Tempo of Switching and Overcoming of Prepotent Responses
Aleksandra Różańska, Weronika Król, Jarosław Orzechowski, Aleksandra Gruszka

Aleksandra Różańska, Jagiellonian University, Institute of Psychology, Romana Ingardena 6, 30-060 Kraków, Poland.
Email: aleksandra.rozanska@doctoral.uj.edu.pl
The current study aimed to uncover the structure of common latent processes underlying the execution of several tasks that hypothetically measure spontaneous and adaptive cognitive flexibility, providing evidence for their convergent validity. A group of healthy volunteers (N = 121) completed two sets of tasks to assess spontaneous and adaptive cognitive flexibility. Spontaneous flexibility measures included a divergent thinking test (to assess fluency and flexibility of thinking) and a verbal fluency test. Adaptive flexibility measures involved a set-switching test as a measure of switch costs and an attentional set-shifting test as a measure of learned irrelevance and perseveration). A vocabulary knowledge test provided a proxy measure of crystallized intelligence. Hierarchical cluster analysis using Ward's method revealed the existence of two separate subgroups of variables. The first group comprised fluency and flexibility of thinking, crystallized intelligence, verbal fluency, and switch costs. The second group included attentional shift variables, that is, learned irrelevance and perseveration. We consider these results meaningful and indicative of two separate factors contributing to cognitive flexibility: (a) speed of switching and (b) overcoming of prepotent responses. We discuss the implications of our results for the assessment of cognitive flexibility.
Keywords: spontaneous cognitive, flexibility, adaptive cognitive flexibility, divergent thinking; taskswitching, attentional set-shifting