Tracing the bilingual advantage in cognitive control: The role of flexibility in temporal preparation and category switching

Abstract

The present study addressed the question whether bilinguals are characterised by increased cognitive flexibility. Mechanisms of cognitive flexibility were compared between a group of Hungarian-Polish bilinguals and a group of Hungarian monolinguals. The first task explored the effects of temporal orienting (ability to voluntarily orient attention to a certain point in time when a relevant event is expected) and the efficiency of switching between preparatory time intervals of different duration (sequential effects). The second task – the social category switching task – tapped into the mechanisms of switching between 2 types of categories (age and gender) and employed socially relevant stimuli (faces). The results of the first task revealed similar temporal orienting effects for both groups; however, the pattern of sequential effects differed between the groups, showing that bilinguals were less affected by the duration of the preceding preparatory interval. In the social category switching task, bilinguals showed reduced switch costs in the RT measure when categorising gender, and greater accuracy in the specific switch and no-switch conditions. We suggest that bilinguals are characterised by an enhanced mechanism of cognitive flexibility, which is applied to a temporal domain (efficient switching between preparatory intervals of different duration), and extends to the cognitive control processes in social categorisation tasks.