The Influence Of Cognitive Style On Cognitive Processes

Cognitive style has been defined as an individual’s characteristic and consistent approach to organizing and processing information. As one of its important dimensions, the wholist-analytic (WA) dimension reflects the way in which an individual organizes information, either globally or in parts, that leads to differences in behavior. Albeit that cognitive style has been found to significantly influence the complex cognitive tasks, such as reading, it remains unclear how it interacts with different phases of the cognitive processes. Given that cognitive activities consist of different phases of processes, and the interaction of different phases influences the task performance, the understanding of how cognitive style interacts with phases of cognitive processes comes to be a question of theoretical and applicational significance. Here, we examined the question from three different aspects, namely, the influence of cognitive style upon the selection of perceptual information, upon the social information, and upon the sentence comprehension, to probe into how cognitive style influences the cognitive processes.This study is composed of three parts. Adopting the flanker-task (Exp.1) and the Stroop paradigm (Exp.2&3), the first part investigated whether cognitive style influences the selection of perceptual information based on the Lavin task. The second part, with the Caucasian and Asian faces as stimuli, examined the influence of cognitive style upon the social information processing respectively through the Composite Face Effect (Exp.4), the Other-race Effect (Exp.5&6), and the Other-race Advantage (Exp.7). In the third part, a sorting task was adopted to explore the influence of cognitive style upon sentence comprehension (Exp.8).The four main findings of this study are as follows:(1) Cognitive style significantly influences the selection of perceptual information that simultaneously appears on the different spatial locations, but does not influence that of the information on different dimensions of a same object. The cognitive load theory only applies to the wholistic subjects.(2) Cognitive style influences the processing of social information. The analytic subjects enjoy processing advantages on the CFE and ORA which require the detailed or local information processing, whereas the wholistic subjects enjoy processing advantages on the ORE which requires global processing.(3) Cognitive style influences the linguistic information subjects rely on in sentence comprehension. The wholists tend to comprehend sentences based on constructions, whereas the analytics rely more on verbs.