Developmental trajectories of set-shifting ability from childhood trough adolescents

Among the Executive Functions (FE), the capacity of set-shifting, ie the ability to quickly and flexibly program responses that change during the course of work (Best et al., 2009), is poorly investigated in the developmental age. To date, there is no evidence that specifically assesses set-shifting skills in Italian school-age children. The objective of our study is to administer the alternate verbal fluency test of Costa et al. (2014) to a large sample of children and adolescents in order to collect normative data in the developmental age. The results suggest that set-shifting ability of children and adolescents improves with age in a linear and progressive way and that compared to what is shown in adulthood (Costa et al., 2010), in children and adolescents the set-shifting abilities appear more pronounced than those of FF.