Cognitive flexibility is the ability to switch between rules, tasks and points of view when the situation changes — to drop an approach that has stopped working and try another. It is one of the three core executive functions, alongside working memory and inhibition, and psychologists measure it with tasks in which the rule changes without warning. It is related to IQ far less than most people assume.
What cognitive flexibility means
Adele Diamond’s review of executive functions in the Annual Review of Psychology describes cognitive flexibility as including “creatively thinking ‘outside the box,’ seeing anything from different perspectives, and quickly and flexibly adapting to changed circumstances”. In the laboratory the idea is narrower. Researchers usually study two things:
- Set shifting — letting go of one rule for sorting or responding and adopting a new one.
- Task switching — moving back and forth between two different tasks, such as judging a number’s size and then its parity.
A 2015 review in Trends in Neurosciences points out that the term is often defined by whichever task a study happened to use, and calls for more consistent definitions. That is worth remembering when a page promises to “boost your cognitive flexibility”: it rarely says which ability it means.
The phrase has a second, unrelated use. “Cognitive flexibility theory” is a theory of learning and instruction for complex subjects, from education research; this page is about the mental ability.
Everyday examples
| Situation | The flexible response | The rigid response |
|---|---|---|
| Your usual road is closed | Re-plan the route and keep going | Keep trying the closed road, or give up |
| A phone call interrupts an email | Switch, then pick the email back up where you left it | Lose the thread of both |
| A colleague raises a fair objection | Update the plan | Defend the original plan regardless |
| A puzzle strategy stops working | Try a different kind of approach | Repeat the same approach harder |
The rigid column is what psychologists call cognitive rigidity or perseveration: continuing with a rule after it has stopped fitting. Everyone does it sometimes, particularly when tired or stressed. Deliberately generating new approaches to a problem is the subject of lateral thinking.
One of three executive functions
The standard model comes from a 2000 study by Akira Miyake and colleagues. They gave 137 college students a battery of simple tasks and used latent-variable analysis to separate three functions: shifting between mental sets, updating and monitoring the contents of working memory, and inhibiting automatic responses. The three were moderately correlated with one another but clearly separable. Diamond’s review adds that flexibility builds on the other two and develops later in childhood.
How cognitive flexibility is measured
The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Esta Berg published it in 1948 as “a simple objective technique for measuring flexibility in thinking”. The person sorts cards that vary by colour, shape and number of symbols. The examiner says only “right” or “wrong”, and after a run of correct sorts the rule changes without warning. Continuing to sort by the old rule is the classic sign of inflexibility. In Miyake’s study, performance on this test was related most strongly to the shifting factor.
Task switching. A 2003 review by Stephen Monsell summarises the central finding: people respond substantially more slowly, and usually make more errors, immediately after a switch of task. This switch cost shrinks when people get time to prepare, but it does not disappear.
Other tasks. Neuropsychologists also use tasks such as Trail Making part B, which alternates between numbers and letters, and children are tested with simpler card-sorting games in which the rule switches from colour to shape.
Is cognitive flexibility the same as IQ?
No, and the gap is larger than intuition suggests. A 2006 study by Naomi Friedman, Miyake and colleagues gave young adults the same three executive-function measures plus tests of fluid and crystallized intelligence and the Wechsler adult IQ scale. Updating working memory was highly correlated with every intelligence measure. Inhibition and shifting were not. When the models controlled for the overlap between the three functions, the links from inhibition and shifting to intelligence were small and not statistically significant.
The authors’ conclusion was that current intelligence tests “do not equally assess a wide range of executive control abilities likely required for many ‘intelligent’ behaviors”. In practical terms, a high score on a reasoning test tells you a lot about how well someone can hold and manipulate information, and very little about how readily they change course. Our executive function guide explains why that also means a gifted person can struggle with switching and self-control, and fluid and crystallized intelligence covers what reasoning tests do measure.
Can you improve cognitive flexibility?
Search results are full of tips — change your routine, play strategy games, learn a language. The research is more cautious.
- Training improves the trained task. A 2019 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled experiments that trained children’s working memory, inhibition or flexibility. Near transfer — improvement on the trained skill — was clear (g = 0.44 across 43 comparisons).
- It does not spread well. Far transfer to the untrained executive functions was small and not significant (g = 0.11 across 17 comparisons). The authors questioned the practical value of training one executive skill in isolation — the same pattern found for dual n-back and working memory training.
- The bilingual advantage is disputed. Three studies comparing bilinguals and monolinguals on 15 measures, including a colour-shape switching task, found no coherent bilingual advantage; the groups also scored identically on Raven’s matrices. Learning a language has many benefits; a proven boost to switching is not clearly one of them.
- General health matters. Diamond’s review notes that stress, lack of sleep, loneliness and lack of exercise each impair executive functions, and that executive functions can improve with practice.
A fair summary: practise the specific switching you need, look after sleep and stress, and be sceptical of any product that promises a general flexibility upgrade.
Development, ADHD and autism
The 2015 neuroscience review describes cognitive flexibility as developing over a long period, from childhood into adulthood, and notes that executive difficulties accompany several neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism, ADHD and obsessive-compulsive disorder; among these, it suggests flexibility may be most affected in autism. These are group findings from research. They do not mean that difficulty switching tasks indicates any condition, and no online task or article can assess that. Questions about yourself or a child belong with a qualified clinician.
Trust and scope notes
This page explains a psychological concept in general terms and is not a diagnostic tool. Our IQ test measures reasoning for adults aged 18 and over; it does not measure cognitive flexibility or any other executive function, and its result should not be read as one.
IQ Revealed is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the researchers, universities and publishers named on this page, or to the publishers of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, the Wechsler scales or Raven’s matrices. Their names are used only to identify the work being described.