Conditional Concept Learning and Cognitive Style

Abstract

It was predicted that (a) Ss with an analytic cognitive style would out-perform Ss with a global cognitive style on compound-cue problems which could be learned by either a conditional rule or a color rule, and (b) global and analytic Ss would perform equally on a single-cue problem which could be solved only by a conditional rule. 36 analytic and 36 global Ss learned one of the two problems. Analysis showed that analytic Ss performed significantly better than global Ss only on the compound-cue problem. The results suggested that the better performance of analytic Ss is limited to problems which require some degree of stimulus differentiation. It was further suggested that additional research on hypothesis-testing might help clarify the differences in performance between analytic and global Ss.