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Mental fatigue from continuous operations without breaks represents a safety issue for military drone operations, as these systems are complex and operate during long shifts. Military operations are hard to study due to their sensitive nature. The open-access program UASOS serves as a testbed to examine the effects of mental fatigue in an ecologically valid environment. UASOS recreates fundamental aspects of military drone operations in a controllable environment that is easy enough for novices to understand but demanding enough to elicit mental fatigue. Participants alternate between navigating a drone-using either a trackball/mouse or a joystick-and searching for visual targets. The protocol is set up in a way that taxes the cognitive flexibility of participants by constantly requiring them to alternate between tasks. In addition, several parameters such as difficulty, duration, questionnaires, training phases, and more can be adapted. The task also allows for synchronization with physiological data using LabStreamingLayer. Implemented in python, the code is set up to be easily installed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children learn to regulate themselves independently at preschool age; thus, adjustment is necessary to improve. Several studies have found the relationship between cool executive function and the development of adjustment. However, little is known about the impact of cool executive function intervention to enhance the adjustment of preschool children. This study investigated the efficacy of an online intervention that focuses on cool executive function components (inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility) in improving children's adjustment during COVID-19 pandemic. The study included seven sessions consisting of 4 different tasks (self-ordered pointing task, flanker task, stop-signal task, and flexible item selection task), which lasted approximately one month. Sixty-four children (48-72 months) who participated in the study were randomized into an experimental or control group. Pre-and post-assessments conducted using Child Adjustment and Parenting Self-efficacy (CAPES). Changes in children's adjustment were analyzed using the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The results indicate that the adjustment among participants has improved significantly only in children aged four years (48-59 months). This finding suggests that the cool executive function intervention can promote early child adjustment by adding another aspect of EF, even in a pandemic condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of the relationships between personal characteristics, thinking preferences and learning activities on academic achievements in creativity studies for innovation management. Development of theory related reflexivity on creative experiences and competence as well as training of required skills in innovation processes needs to activate both the pre-requisites and predictors of creativity (OECD, 2019). Statistical analysis of quantitative data and qualitative data collected within the framework of a course aiming to develop competence and skills for creativity in innovation processes' is presented. The results are related in the model for covarying creativity constructs based on the statistical correlation and regression analyzes. Based on this developed understanding consequences for developing creativity competences and considerations for assessment and grading of academic achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of COVID-19 has an effect on health and functioning of undergraduate students all over the world, including Thailand, whereas the psychological attribute of cognitive flexibility has been confirmed in the literature to alleviate negative feelings from stressful situations and increase positive emotions. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine a pathway to happiness for Thai undergraduate students during the COVID-19 outbreak in the case where a perceived COVID-19 stressor was an exogenous variable and cognitive flexibility wTas a mediating variable. The study employed a cross-sectional research design with 331 Thai undergraduate students. Three questionnaires were used: (1) the COVID-19 stressor questionnaire; (2) the Cognitive Flexibility Inventory (CFI), which was divided into two components, the alternatives scale and the control scale; and (3) the Thai Happiness Indicators (THI-15). The dataset was analyzed by partial correlation and path analysis. The findings revealed that perceived COVID-19 stressors had a negative direct effect on happiness, whereas the alternative scale and control scale were mediating variables with a positive indirect effect in-between perceived COVID-19 stressors and happiness with an acceptable index of fit. These findings highlight the possibility that cognitive flexibility could assist Thai students in lowering stress and enhancing positive emotions during the epidemic. Its contribution may enable the institution to incorporate cognitive flexibility into the curriculum or implement it as a university-wide health promotion policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical decisions have an impact on our daily life regardless of the importance of the decisions. Moral judgment processes are affected by cognitive sources and performance. Theoretically, moral cognition is always connected to mental reasoning and executive functions. Cognitive flexibility, as one of the executive functions, determines how people change and modify their response until it is appropriate, and people's cognitive flexibilities can be distinguished using switching tasks. With their cognitive flexibility, people use their cognition to adapt and deal with stimuli. This research explored and distinguished individual responses between blocks of (picture or text) stimuli in the moral dilemma scenario. The stimuli presentation was carried out using experyment, a lightweight Python library. The research consisted of two phases. Study 1 sought to differentiate and categorize participants into high and low cognitive flexibility capacity groups using the behavioral paradigm of task switching (p < 0.001) and switch-trial was found to take a longer time to respond than same-trial. In Study 2, based on the average switch-cost value in the first study (mean = 922 ms), two groups were formed (the fast and slow groups). The analysis results showed a significant difference between groups and types of stimuli (p < 0.001; Mallow's Cp = 66.2). This finding implies that individuals who have adaptive thinking flexibility might be faster in dealing with decision dilemma than who do not. The fast-switch group was also found outperforming the slow-switch group in both moral image (p < 0.05; z ratio = 2.650) and text tasks (p < 0.05; z ratio = 4.119). This study shows that a lab experiment with a noncomplex paradigm is adequate to detect and predict more complex decision-making such as in moral dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study intends to address associations between dialectical thinking of 6-7 years old children and their emotional and executive functioning development. Participants were 152 children. One method was used to assess their emotion recognition by facial expression. Executive functioning was assessed in accordance with the Miyake model, which distinguishes three components of that: working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibition control. Dialectical thinking was assessed using three techniques aimed at analyzing children's understanding of the principle of cyclicality, ability to identify contradictions and find opposites to phenomena. Also, a number of parents was interviewed using the questionnaire, which allowed for additional analysis of associations between dialectical thinking and demographic variables such as the number of children in families, the level of mother's education and family income level. The results showed that understanding of the cyclicality principle is related to executive functioning. In turn, all three indicators of dialectical thinking were significantly related to emotion recognition. Taken together, these results suggest that dialectical thinking is associated with emotional knowledge and executive functioning in 6-7 years aged children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a well-known fact that schenkerian principles of analysis and musical thinking open comprehensions of the musical works that are not reachable by using other methods of analysis. Breaking a piece down into manageable fragments and identifying strategies for sight reading, learning and memorizing are steps that have to be identified and completed that could be possibly leading to the development of the brain functions that are essential to instrument playing but also for the cognitive control of behavior. The structural analysis offers the awareness and the self-monitoring that can help in this matter. A musician who understands the effects and functions will reveal the richness of the analysis in the performance of the work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading comprehension (RC) is a complex, dynamic process by which readers interact with text to construct meaning. It relies on word level reading skills such as vocabulary and reading fluency, as well as on higher level-skills, such as literal comprehension, simile comprehension, inference generation, and comprehension monitoring or control. So far, there is limited evidence on the relationship between young children's reading comprehension and executive functions (EF), namely complex functions that support an individual's goal-directed behavior. There are more studies relating children's reading comprehension performance with their working memory capacity, allowing the concurrent active maintenance and manipulation-processing of information in the mind. Most studies however, have involved general comprehension assessments, rather than measures of the above mentioned higher-level processes. The present study aims at shedding more light on this area, by examining the relative contribution of key executive functions (inhibition, updating, cognitive flexibility) and working memory to reading comprehension skills in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life success depends increasingly on the mastery of executive functions such as, working memory, shifting, and inhibiting. Executive functions, are cognitive processes that regulate behaviour, also influencing and predicting the development of other cognitive skills (Van der van et al, 2012). These functions are processes that regulate one's thoughts or behaviour. This paper will provide an overview of evidence regarding the development of executive functions in children, including key findings discussing their implications for children's learning, and indicating issues that merit further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An online cognitive flexibility hypertext environment of engineering ethics cases including multiple and conflicting perspectives was constructed to engage engineering students in ethical problem solving. This study compared the effects of different link types (embedded links or links stated as questions) within the environment on students' problem solving performance and environment usage. Students who studied the hypertext with question links applied more perspectives and canons and wrote stronger overall solutions to ethics problems than students who navigated the hypertext using embedded links. There were no significant differences in the frequency of clicks on all links in the CFH environment, the frequency of revisiting links (crisscrossing), and the number of unique links visited by individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intentions are considered critical to the behavior of starting new business ventures. However, there is limited understanding of their cognitive antecedents. In this paper, we use theoretical tenets from cognitive sciences, cognitive psychology and entrepreneurial cognitions stream of research to analyze the impact that cognitive flexibility has on individual's efficacy and intentions towards entrepreneurship. Based on a survey of 441 respondents, our findings suggest that cognitive flexibility is an important factor that impacts individual's efficacy and intentions towards entrepreneurship. Further, we also find that its effect is mediated by attitude towards autonomy and attitude towards risk taking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals differ in the degree of agency they exhibit in their networking behavior, that is, in the extent to which their networking is driven by forethought. We argue that, given a minimum level of awareness of one's network and search target, networking that is more agentic (i.e. forethought-driven) will be more effective. Results of an interactive networking experiment (n=43) suggest that individuals who, in their observed networking, follow through on their task-related forethought, find more relevant information, and are more likely to succeed in their search efforts. In addition, we find that such individuals are characterized by higher levels of cognitive flexibility. As our work links micro-level cognitive characteristics to network outcomes, it may inspire future research on the role of individual agency in social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]