Unkept promises of cognitive styles: A new look at old measurements

Abstract

Cognitive style is thought to be a stable marker of one’s way to approach mental operations. While of wide interest over the last decades, its operationalization remains a challenge. The literature indicates that cognitive styles assessed via i) questionnaires are predicted by personality and ii) performance tests (e.g., Group Embedded Figures Test; GEFT) are related to general intelligence. In the first study, we tested the psychometric relationship between the Cognitive Style Index questionnaire (CSI) and personality inventories (NEO Five Factor Inventory; NEO-FFI, HEXACO Personality Inventory Revised; HEXACO-PI-R). In the second study, we assessed the CSI, NEO-FFI, GEFT and a general intelligence test (Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices Test; RSMT). We found that CSI scores were largely predicted by personality and that CSI was uncorrelated with GEFT performance. Instead, better performance on the GEFT was associated with better performance on the RSMT. We conclude that i) cognitive style questionnaires overlap with personality inventories, ii) cognitive style performance tests do not measure cognitive styles and should not be used as such and iii) the cognitive style concept needs to be assessed with alternative measurement types. We discuss possible future directions.

Cultural variations in global and local attention and eye-movement patterns during the perception of complex visual scenes: Comparison of Czech and Taiwanese university students

“…The results raise questions of a) the validity of the concept of cognitive styles and b) its dichotomous nature. In terms of a), Cuneo et al [65] tested the discriminant validity of methods for analytic-holistic style diagnostics and found that questionnaire methods overlapped with personality and that maximum performance methods (Group Embedded Figures Test) overlapped with intelligence. Further research should test the construct, concurrent and discriminant validity of cognitive styles, especially in relation to personality and intelligence.…”

The contribution of field independence in virtual spatial updating

“…Specifically, on the one hand, the disembedding ability allows people to memorize structural object characteristics which enabled a greater differentiation in perceptual functioning and as a consequence a better ability in recognizing objects, that is, it permits people to extract salient information from the surrounding environment. On the other hand, the perspectivism ability allows people to recognize visual perspectives other than those of the learned path, that is, it permits to adopt other people's perspective (e.g., Witkin and Goodenough 1977;Cuneo et al 2018). It appears clear that both disembedding and perspectivism underlie the ability to perform changes of perspective and updating spatial information being typically associated with FI people (Witkin and Goodenough 1977).…”

When leaders are marketers: a duality perspective on the effect of openness to experience on marketing behaviors and the moderating role of bottom-line mentality

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