Attention and Cognitive Style in Children

Influence of the difficulty of the Matching Familiar Figures Test-20 on the assessment of reflection–impulsivity: An item analysis

“…Furthermore, the results showed that latencies stabilize at the age of 8, whereas errors continue to decrease. These results support the pioneering hypotheses of Zelniker and Jeffrey (1979), which suggested that differences between reflectives and impulsives do not decrease with age. The authors stressed that children do not necessarily become more reflective, but simply more efficient at solving the items of the MFFT.…”

“…The responses in the remaining age groups indicate an average task difficulty that gradually decreases. These results seem to lend support to the hypotheses of Zelniker and Jeffrey (1979). However, the items are considered easier for the 12-year-old group (M = .61), even though the values are not so high when compared to those obtained for 6-year-old children.…”

Cognitive styles in children: some evolving trends∗

“…Further, even in the case of the error measure, the correlational pattern is not consistent with Kagan's early formulation. An alternative position advanced by Zelniker and Jeffrey (1979) argues for a value-neutral stance in which impulsive children do not Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 17:57 27 December 2014 necessarily employ a deficient information-processing strategy, but rather one that is merely different from the strategy favored by reflective children. This view is appealing and consistent with a "style" interpretation, but it would be premature to embrace it fully at the present time.…”

“…But with intentional learning as the criterion, reflectives performed more competently. Zelniker and Jeffrey (1979) and Kogan (1983) offer a more detailed discussion of how reflective and impulsive children employ strategies and cope with task demands.…”

“…Note, finally, that a comparable incipient development characterizes the reflection-impulsivity construct. Whereas the early research suggested that impulsiveness is handicapping across a wide range of cognitive tasks, more recent work has at least raised the possibility that impulsiveness may prove beneficial for particular kinds of tasks (Zelniker & Jeffrey, 1979;Weiner & Berzonsky, 1975).…”