The Relationship Between Central Executive, Cognitive Style And Adults' Arithmetic Strategy Use: Evidence From Computational Estimation

Individual strategy use is one of the forefront areas in international cognitive scientific researches in recent years, as the flexibility, adaptivity and efficiency of strategy use has become the focus of the current academic concerns. Computational estimation has been considered as the typical arithmetic cognitive task through which can investigate the featuresof human approximate number system (ANS). The individual strategy use in the face of specific arithmetic task will be affected by multiple individual difference factors, including central executive function of working memory,, cognitive style and arithmetic skills are some important factors that can influence cognitive performance.This research includes both behavioral and eye movement experiments. On the basis of controlling the arithmetic skills, used the choice/no-choice method, which is the new paradigm to investigate individual's strategy change, to probe the computational estimation strategy use differences between adult individuals with field-independent and field-dependent cognitive style when they solved two-digits multiplication problems. Then combined the choice/no-choice method and eye movement technique, in order to make a thorough inquiry of the two kinds of individuals'eye movement patterns when they used computational estimation strategies, simultaneously, discussed the relationship between the sub-elements of central executive function and the performances of computational estimation strategy use. All the above is in order to deeply comprehend the role that individual differences, which are refered in preamble, affect on strategy use.In behavioral research, the choice/no-choice method, which includes a free- choice condition and several (two in this research) no-choice conditions, were used to investigate the subjects'performance of using rounding-up and rounding-down strategy when they solved multiplicative estimation problems. In addition, in view of specific characteristics for this study, the best-strategy choice condition was designed extra. Subjects were asked to solve two-digits multiplicative problems: free-choice condition—choose which strategy they use to solve each problem freely; best-strategy choice condition—choose the strategy that will yield the product that is as close as possible of the correct product; no-choice/rounding-up condition—use the rounding-up strategy to solve all problems; no-choice/rounding-down condition—use the rounding-down strategy to solve all problems. The result indicated that subjects with different cognitive styles showed no significant differences in strategy use, but the field-independent subjects performed slightly better than the field-dependent ones, both in strategy execution and the adaptivity of strategy use.In eye movement research, the conditions of eye-movement experiment were designed as the same as in behavioral research. In addition, the tests of central executive functions of inhibition, swtiching and memory updating were designed. The numerical STROOP task, more-odd shifting task and n-back paradigm were respectively used to test the three functions above. The results of eye-movement experiment sealed the behavioral one, that was field independent/dependent cognitive style did not cause significant differences in strategy use. However, correlation analysis showed that two types of individuals with a variety of the central executive test scores appeared varying correlation to various eye movement indexes of strategy use, for instance, the function of inhibition and field-dependent individuals'strategy selection is closely related, and that to field-independent ones'strategy execution; the reaction time of field-independent individuals when they choice the best strategy was closely related to the switching function, but when retrieved information from each digit, field-dependent individuals'switching function involved more. In brief, the function of inhibition and switching, especially the latter, appeared the most closely relationships to strategy use. By contrast, the memory updating involved less in arithmetic cognitive process.Through the analysis of the strategy performance and its relationship to central executive function of the two kinds of subjects, cognitive style and the central executive function of working memory are both individual difference factors that affect arithmetic strategy use , and cognitive style influences individuals'strategy use by way of the complicated function of the central executive.