The Influence Of College Students' Cognitive Styles And Processing Mode On Unconscious Thought

Unconscious thought refers to the process of cognitive or affective thought that occurs when attention is paid but consciousness is not awakened(Nordgren,Bos &Dijksterhuis,2011).The unconscious thought effect means that when solving complex problems,the results of unconscious thought is better than conscious thought.This effect is completely contrary to the traditional concept.Once it was raised,it was constantly questioned.However,in the voice of doubt,the experiment of unconscious thought was repeated and innovated,and the existence of unconscious thought effect was also recognized.The focus of researchers' attention had turned to research on the influencing factors that caused poor stability of unconscious thought effect.This study used the classical unconscious thought paradigm.On the basis of verifying the unconscious thought effect,we explored the difference of unconscious thought between the two cognitive styles,field independent and field dependent,and the influence of the overall-local processing mode on this difference was studied.This study consists of three experiments:Experiment 1 verified the unconscious thought effect.Using single factor completely random design,the independent variable was thinking type(conscious vs.Unconscious vs.immediate),and the dependent variables were the optimal option selection rate and score difference between the best option and the worst one.The results showed that,on the optimal option selection rate and score difference,both the unconscious thought and the immediate decision-making group were significantly higher than the conscious thought group.There was no significant difference between the unconscious thought group and the immediate decision-making group on the two sets of data.Experiment 2 explored the difference of unconscious thought in different field cognitive styles.Using single factor completely random design,the independent variable was cognitive style(field independent vs.field dependent),and the dependent variables were the optimal option selection rate and score difference between the best and the worst.The results showed that there was no significant difference between the field independent group and the field dependent group on the optimal option selection rate and the score deference.Experiment 3 explored the impact of processing mode on the unconscious thought of different field cognitive styles.Adopting 2(cognitive style: field independent vs.field dependent)×2(processing mode: overall vs.local)experimental design of the inter-test,set the score difference between the best option and the worst option as the dependent variable.The results found that there was no significant difference in the score difference between the field independent group and the field dependent group during the overall processing.In the local processing,the score difference of the field dependent group was significantly higher than that of the field independent group.Through the above three experiments,this study can get the following conclusions:(1)While solving complex problems,the results of unconscious thought are obviously better than conscious thought.(2)There is no significant difference in unconscious thought of field independent and field dependent cognitive styles.(3)In the case of local processing,the field dependents' performs better than the field independent ones with unconscious thought.