BCS 111 Lecture 13

Cognitive style

Your preferred ways of solving problems and making decisions

• Also associated with personality (e.g., conservative vs. riskier decision)

• Can be influenced by external factors (e.g., alcohol, substance abuse)

Cognitive styles

• Field-dependent vs. Field independent (FD vs. FI)

  • When manifested in perceptual processing: Context-dependent vs. Context-independent

  • When manifested in personality: Dependent vs. Autonomous

Framed-Line Test: Individual difference in cognitive styles – cultural effect

• Contexual information in perception

• Cultural differences:

  • Japanese: field dependent

  • American: field independent (FI style)

Task: Framed-Line Test (FLT)

• Absolute task: re-drawn line should be of the same length as the original

• Relative task: keep the same ratio Length of new line / height of new box = Length of the original line / height of the original box

  • Americans (FI style) should perform better in absolute than in relative task

Results

strong cultural effect

• Japanese did better in the relative task than in the absolute task → FD style (context-dependent)

• Opposite pattern for Americans → FI style (context-independent)

Results (experiment 2)

• Location/environment also matters!!

• Americans in Japan perform more like Japanese.

• Japanese living in the US perform less similarly to those living in Japan

Reflectivity

careful in making decisions (slow but more accurate)

Impulsivity

fast but lots of errors

Cognitive styles

Matching Familiar Figure Test

• Measurement: The time it takes to give the first response

  • Fast but inaccurate resp: impulsivity

Reflectivity/Impulsivity

Substance users vs. Control group in Matching Familiar Figure Test:

• MDMA users made a lot more errors but faster responses than the other two groups → Evidence for impulsivity

Cognitive styles

• Reflectivity/Impulsivity assessed by Matching Familiar Figure Test

• BUT: Does it only measure reflectivity and impulsivity?]

  • What else does it measure?

What else does the matching familiar figure test measure?

What else does it measure?

• Visual search/perception

• Attention

• Decision making

• Search strategy: self-terminating vs. exhaustive

  • Similar to memory search

Cognitive aging: one example – decline of inhibitory control in bilinguals

Inhibitory control: being aware of the stimulus change and shift attention accordingly

Cognitive aging in bilinguals: one
example - inhibitory control

Summary of Simon Task

• Ss see one dot on the screen each time.

• The dot on either left of right edge

  • If Red dot, press their right-hand key

  • If Blue dot, press their left-hand key (Respond based on colors, not location!)

• Two conditions:

  • Congruent: red dot on right edge

  • Incongruent: red dot on left edge → inhibitory control required

Cognitive aging in bilinguals: one example - inhibitory control

Simon effect = RT (incongruent) – RT (congruent)

• Large effect indicates poorer inhibitory control

  • Simon effect (old) > Simon effect (young): poorer inhibitory control in the older groups

• Monolinguals experience even larger Simon effect than bilinguals!

  • One cognitive benefit of bilingualism

Cultural influence on cognition

Is everything in our cognition influenced by our culture?

Cultural relativism

cognitive processes influenced by culture (e.g., categorization, cognitive styles)

Cultural universality

cognitive processes independent of culture (e.g. sensory processing)

How culture influences cognition

To name just a few:

• Cognitive styles

• Object recognition

• Perception and categorization

• Counting…etc.

Cultural differences in categorization

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Categorization

Knowledge-based categorization

• Cultural and educational influence on
  knowledge

• How do you categorize “Hat, gloves, sunglasses”?

Prototype and exemplars

What’s your prototype of sea cucumber if
you’ve never seen it?

Cultural influence on counting

But Oksapmin (a language spoken in Papua New Guinea) uses 27 body parts for counting!!!

• Oksapmin children’s development of counting turns out to be later than American children.

  • Can also be explained by “conditioning”!

  • Support cultural relativism

And don’t forget…language is also part of our culture!!

The Pirahã counting system has 3 words: 1, 2 and many

• Supports both linguistic relativism and cultural relativism!

Summary: Individual differences

• Individual differences can result from cognitive styles, cognitive abilities, cognitive aging, as well as cultural influences.

• Simon task: inhibitory control task

• Cultural impact on cognition: cultural universality and cultural relativism