University students' visual cognitive styles with respect to majors and years

Abstract

Visual cognitive style is an individual difference that is related to the preference or visual imagery tendency of an individual of processing visual information. This study examines the visual cognitive styles of university students according to their study subject, study year and genders and includes 448 first- and third-year university students from seven departments. The results indicate that spatial imagery tendencies were stronger among students in the sciences, whereas verbal tendencies were strong among students in linguistic fields. The spatial imagery tendencies of third-year students from the Department of Physics Engineering and the verbal tendencies of third-year students from the Department of English Language Teaching were significantly higher than those of first-year students of related departments. Different from previous studies the finding about the tendency increment among first to third year of study is remarkable which can be investigated through experimental studies.