Kognitívna flexibilita študentov a profesionálnych tlmočníkov
Cognitive flexibility: students versus professional interpreters

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents research aimed at investigating cognitive flexibility. We tried to find out whethercognitive flexibility, the ability to switch a response according to the context of a situation, improves asa result of extensive experience in interpreting. The research sample consisted of 16 subjects who weredivided into two groups. The first group consisted of final year students in a Master's degree programmein Philology (formerly Translation and Interpreting) and fresh graduates in the same field (N = 7). Thesecond group consisted of professional interpreters (N = 9) with different years of experience (6 to 25years, mean 14.2 years). The research instrument used was the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST).The test is used to measure high-level cognitive processes such as abstract thinking, cognitive flexibility,and set shifting. It can be characterized as a method measuring executive functions. Based on theliterature and several similar studies, we assumed that cognitive flexibility would be higher in the groupof professional interpreters, not due to differences in age, but mainly due to their expertise as a result ofextensive experience in interpreting. Our expectations were confirmed by the research findings, whichshowed significantly better performances of the professionals in all the examined criteria. We cannotgeneralize and apply the findings to the entire population of professional interpreters and students ofinterpreting in Slovakia, as we worked with only a small research sample. However, our findings are inline with other research studies that confirm the importance of expertise and extensive experience ininterpreting, in distinguishing students from professional interpreters. At the same time, the conductedresearch can provide partial additional information about the cognitive flexibility of professionalinterpreters when compared to students.

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