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SCIENCES
Education and Training, Field Director – Jean-Marc Labat
Cognition and Learning Processes, Subject Head – Emmanuel Sander
Cognitive Flexibility
The Cornerstone of Learning
Coordinated by
Evelyne Clément
First published 2022 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
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UK
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA
© ISTE Ltd 2022
The rights of Evelyne Clément to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946241
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78945-035-4
ERC code:
SH4 The Human Mind and Its Complexity
SH4_1 Cognitive basis of human development and education, developmental disorders; comparative cognition
SH4_6 Learning, memory; cognition in ageing
Introduction
Evelyne CLÉMENT
Paragraphe, CY Cergy Paris University, Gennevilliers, France
Over the past three decades, the study of the flexible nature of human cognition has been of growing interest to scientists and practitioners specializing in early childhood, neuropsychology and education. In many manifestations of human activity, an important issue is to understand the nature and development of cognitive flexibility and the processes and contexts that promote or inhibit its expression. This issue is crucial in the field of lifelong learning, and more particularly in the field of school learning.
As evidenced by the scientific literature in this field of research, and although different understandings of flexibility have been proposed – with some defining it as a general and universal process independent of the contexts in which it is expressed, others, on the contrary, as a skill that develops at the same time as other abilities, such as conceptual and language development – a broad consensus is emerging on the flexible nature of human cognition to adapt to novelty and unexpected events. In this sense, as a cornerstone of learning, cognitive flexibility allows us to adapt to a constantly changing environment, to discover solutions in new and/or unexpected situations, to transfer knowledge learned in one context to a new context, to select the relevant stimuli in the environment to achieve a goal, to switch our attention from one stimulus to another according to the constraints of the situation, to alternate between two possible forms of processing stimuli, and to change our representation