The Effect Of Cognitive Style On Source Memory

Source Memory (SM) refers to the recollection of the detail context of an event, which makes the judgment to the information's source. Such cognitive process involves collecting the different characteristics of the information, such as time, spatial, social relations, way of acceptance and so on. The vivid accurate memory in real life mainly relies on correct source memory. Many phenomena of real life and medical clinics are related to source memory,such as erroneous memory that individual experienced the event, wrong testimony of eyewitness. With the development of source memory studies, researchers take more attention to study the source in specific groups. At present, the studies of individual difference mostly concern the differences of different age groups (children and eldly), healthy-unhealthy groups, normal-disabled groups, and even good-bad students in their scores with different scores of source memory. Many studies showed that cognitive style (field- dependence/ independence, FDI) was associated with material's source information. That is to say, there are differences in attentional event between field-dependence (FD) and field-independence (FI) subjects .As we know, episodic memory is composed with source memory and item memory, including content and context. Previous study based on different cognition mostly paid attention to the content in episodic event. There was little research on source memory. Hence, the purpose here was to study the differences between FD and FI individuals in source memory in different encoding ways, and influence on them when encode condition was changed.In this study, three experiments were performed with different encoding ways: Experiment 1 studied the differences between FD and FI individuals in different encoding ways in internal source memory, which adopted a 2 (cognitive style: FD, FI)×3 (encoding way: semantic process, phonological process, non-process source) repeated test design, with encoding way being within-subject variables and cognitive style being between-subject variable. Experiment 2 studied the influence of semantic process attentional condition on external location source memory in FD and FI individuals. It adopted a 2 (cognitive style: FD, FI)×3 (location of source: left, right, no location source) repeated test design. Cognitive style was between-subject variables and location source was within-subject variable. Experiment 3 studied the influence of phonological process attentional condition on external size source memory in FD and FI individuals. It adopted a 2 (cognitive style: FD, FI)×3 (size source: large, small, no size source) repeated test design. Size source was within-subject variable and cognitive style was between-subject variable.The results indicated that: (1) The score of source in individuals of different cognitive style was significantly different. The score of source in FI subjects were better than that in FD subjects in internal source. That indicated that FD subjects were more affected by encoding way. (2) The score of source in individuals of different cognitive style was not significantly different in external source. (3) Encoding way affected the score of source, with the score of internal source in the phonological process condition greater than that in semantic process condition. (4) The influence of encoding way on the external source in FD and FI individuals was different between semantic process condition and phonological process condition. (5) Materials stimulus variation influences the score of source memory. The score in the consistent conditions was better than that in the inconsistent conditions.