Study On The Social Orientation Of Field-dependent And Field-independent Individual In Chinese Word Recognition Task

Cognitive style of field dependence is defined as the aptitude to refer to outer cues or inner cues. The individuals with different cognitive style are distinct both in their mind and behaviors. As for field-dependent individuals (FDs), they depend more on outer cues during information processing, and are more easily affected by them, they are social oriented with superior socail techniques; as for field-independent individuals (FIs), they depend more on inner cues during information processing, and they are non-social oriented with superior cognitive restructuring techniques. Orientation refers to the aptitude to attend: social or non-social information. Memory bias of FD for social information is one of the manifestations of social orientation. The earliest related finding came from the researches on the recognition of face pictures, FDs performed significantly better than FIs. Other evidence of FD's social orientation in memory was found in laboratory researches, with the paradigm of incidental learning. In the experiments with the recognition task of social words and neutral words, also found in free recall task, FDs remembered significantly more social words than neutral ones, while FIs remembered more neutral words than social ones. However not all finding of this field were consistent, some other investigations did not find the difference of recognition between social words and neutral words. After summarizing, comparing and analyzing all those experiments, Witkin (1977) argued that the memory bias of FDs for social information did not derive from the superior memory of FDs, but from the more attention to social information, specifically, only with the condition of incidental learning, without indicating subjects of both FD and FI to memorize intentionally the information being presented. After analyzing those related literatures, some questions are raised: firstly, most evidence of this field comes from quasi-experiments, without strict control. Secondly, the findings from laboratory researches were not...