The Flanker Task Summary

Although there are several other tasks that have been performed to explore the bilingual cognitive advantages the final task that will be discussed in this paper is the Flanker task. As described by Buac and Kaushanskaya (2014), the Flanker task requires participants to identify the direction of the arrow of focus while disregarding information fed to them by flanking arrows. Another goal of the Flanker task, aside from identifying the direction of the main arrow, is to also identify whether it is in agreement or disagreement with the surrounding arrows. One study used older bilingual adults recruited from a Health Fair geared for seniors, an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and compared them to bilinguals in college. The study was looking to explore how bilingualism impacts the brain as it ages, and how the cognitive functions age with bilingualism; specifically language control.
However, when presented with other tasks, the older adults performed similarly. The researchers think that this may be because language control (measured by a fluency task in this study) isn’t impacted as significantly in old age as compared to executive control (which is measured by the Flanker in this study). In contrast to Buac and Kaushanskaya’s (2014) results showed that the children who performed better on the Flanker task, were also those who performed better on the other linguistically focused tasks. The belief behind these results was that the control skills targeted by the Flanker tasks are intertwined with attentional language control. However, this may only be an interpretation due to a lack of consistent definition of what the tasks are measuring and how the data should analyzed and