Cognitive Style And Task Difficulty On Students' Psychological Folding - Expand Eye Move Research

The research is devoted to investigate the influence of field dependent cognitive style and task difficulty exerts on college students'mental folding-unfolding and explore students'eye-movement characteristics in the process of mental folding-unfolding, with the help of SMI iView Hi-Speed eye-tracker. At the same time we are concerted about the gender difference in these. The research is adopted 3(field dependent cognitive style)×2(task difficulty)×2(gender) mixed experimental design.72 subjects are employed in the official test, evenly divided between male and female.12 questions are selected from Administrative Aptitude Test for civil servants in previous years and geometric textbook of middle school.Results:(1) In terms of mental folding-unfolding accuracy, both the field dependent cognitive style and the task difficulty have remarkable main effect. The field-independent students have the highest accuracy rate over other kinds of students,and field-dependent subjects have the lowest accuracy rate. The accuracy rates of easy tasks are significant higher than that of hard tasks. There is no significant discrepancy in accuracy of mental folding and mental unfolding between male and female college students. (2) The analysis of the two aspects, eye-movement trajectory as a whole and eye-movement index of region of interest, shows that the field-independent subjects spend longer first pass-time, less fixation duration, less fixation times and less regression times than the middle style, the field-dependent subjects are in contrast with the field-independent ones. The easy tasks have less first pass-time, fixation duration, fixation times and regression times than that of hard tasks. The male have less fixation duration and fixation times than the female. (3) From the eye-movement trajectory, we can see that, the fixations of the field-independent subjects were more concentrated in the heading and the standard stimuli; the field-dependent subjects jumping constantly among the heading, the standard stimuli and the options; the middle style is between the two groups.Conclusions:(1) Field dependent cognitive style, task difficulty are important factors affecting the mental folding-unfolding performance. The more the field dependent cognitive style tends to be field-independent the subjects are, the higher accuracy rate they make; whatever the field dependent cognitive style of subjects, the accuracy rates of easy tasks are significant higher than that of hard tasks; the male have no significant higher than that of the female. (2) The analysis of the two aspects, eye-movement trajectory as a whole and eye-movement index of region of interest, shows that field dependent cognitive style, task difficulty and gender all have important influence in the eye-movement index. (3) Field-independent subjects are inclined to adopt analysis strategy and rule-constructing strategy; field-dependent subjects are inclined to adopt Gestalt strategy and rule-deleting strategy; the middle style is between the two subjects.