COGNITIVE STYLE AND PERSONALITY: SCANNING AND ORIENTATION TOWARD AFFECT1

Abstract

The cognitive style dimension of scanning refers to consistent individual differences in the extensiveness and intensity of spontaneous attention deployment, leading to individual variations in vividness of experience and the span of awareness. The cognitive style of focusing was conceived as an adaptive counterpart to the defense mechanism of isolation, with the expectation that extreme focusers would concentrate their awareness on relevant task features in narrow and discriminating ways. A factor analytic study was conducted to assess scanning and focusing tendencies in a wide variety of perceptual tasks in an effort to document the convergent and discriminant correlations that would clarify the interpretation of the scanning cognitive style. The extensive experimental battery was administered to 122 male and 92 female college students. Separate factor analyses were conducted for males and females. Results of the study leave little doubt that the cognitive style of scanning refers to an organized hierarchy of dimensions exhibiting a qualitatively different structure in males and females. Implications for cognitive style and its measurement are discussed. (Contains 2 figures, 22 tables, and 83 references.) (SLD)