9 cognitive styles

This term was introduced by American psychologist Gordon Allport (1897-1967) in his famous theory of personality and from studies of Carl Jung (1875-1961). Cognitive styles are general psychological dimensions by which people differ. Cognitive styles refer to individual differences in ways of perceiving, remembering or thinking and how do people. For the latter, we can say that the main element of cognitive styles is not the efficiency with which it is done, but rather how it does what it does. A cognitive style is based on the way to process information and to use own, such as perception, thought, perception and memory and that are related to the individual personality cognitive resources.

9 Cognitive Styles.

There have been numerous authors who have tried to classification of the types of cognitive styles, explain the proposal Messick (1976). This author described 9 different styles of cognitive styles among which the dependence-field independence and reflexivity-impulsivity dimension. Later it would expand the list to 19 different cognitive styles.

1. Field Dependence-Independence.

In this cognitive style what is studied is the ability to act in a differentiated way the environment. This is the way in which people rely on their own internal perceptions to not be misled by information from external or environmental perceptions.

The independence of the field increases to 15 years of age, tend to stabilize and begin to decline.
Self-employed persons do not have to be smarter.
An independent person tends to predispose to have delusions.
A dependent person is predisposed to substance or fall into emotional dependency relationships.

2. Reflectivity-impulsivity.

In this style the tendency is to take decisions fast or slow. The most thoughtful people tend to be more conservative than impulsive. Reflective analyze the situation carefully and analytically depending on the various alternatives. Quite the opposite for impulsive people who are influenced by the appearance of any of the alternatives.

3. Scrutinizing.

It refers to individual differences in amplitude and intensity of care.

4. Extent of categorization.

Individual differences in tendency to process information in wider as opposed to the tendency to process it in categories of small size categories.

5. Style conceptualization.

This style is very similar to the amplitude of categorization. The style of conceptualization refers more specifically to individual differences in the tendency to classify a heterogeneous set of stimuli in a large number or small number of categories. An example of this type of style is that there are people for whom there are only 5 colors and other categorizing to different kinds of white color.

6. Complexity – Simplicity Cognitive.

Individual differences in tendency to interpret situations, especially social, of a multidimensional and abstract form as opposed to the tendency to interpret dimensional and concrete way.

7. leveling – Worsening.

Individual differences in memory performance.

Levelers: assimilate and confound their current perceptions stored in memory experiences.
The agudizadores: distinguish the information stored in the memory of the current information.
8. restrictive control – Flexible Control.

Individual differences in the difficulty or ease to overcome perceptual or cognitive interference.

9. Tolerance – Intolerance.

It refers to the tolerance or intolerance of people to unusual situations. Thus, people differ in their more or less willingness to accept and tolerate incongruent or unusual perceptions or experiences regarding what the individual knows or knows.

Other cognitive styles.

• Display-verbalizer.
• Visual-Haptic.
• Serial-Holistic.

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Bibliographic references:

Santrock, J.W. Educational Psychology (2011). Ed. McGraw-Hill.