In the past decade, there has been an increased interest among researchers in the relationship between personality and executive functions, and how the two constructs relate to each other. Despite the growing number of authors who have researched this phenomenon, the findings are quite inconsistent and contradictory. In our research we focused on the associations between the Big Five personality factors and cognitive flexibility, working memory and inhibition. 321 participants (of which 109 were men) aged between 8 and 86 years took part in the research. The Verbal Working Memory Task was used to measure working memory. The task consisted of four parts, each testing memory span in a different way. The participants had to remember the given sequence of information and recall it after a short delay. The computerized version of the Flexible Switching Test was used to measure cognitive flexibility. The participants had to decide if a stimulus consisting of a combination of a letter and a number corresponded to the given rules. Inhibition was measured with the computerized version of the Stroop task in which participants had to respond to presented congruent and incongruent stimuli. We used three different measures inhibition to control whether different calculation methods differ from each other. We also used the Big Five Personality Test to measure personality traits. The results showed that the openness correlates positively with verbal working memory, cognitive flexibility and one measure of inhibition, calculated in the second part of the Stroop task. Conscientiousness was negatively correlated with two measures of inhibition, calculated in first and second part of the Stroop task. Neuroticism, extraversion and agreeableness were not correlated with any of the executive functions. The findings of our research show that there are significant connections between openness, conscientiousness and executive functions, which should be in future investigated in more detail.
|
