Cognitive strategies, field dependence, and the abstraction process

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Subjects were given a concept learning task in which potentially relevant dimensions were characteristics descriptive of people. Some stimuli consisted of verbal descriptions alone, and others consisted of verbal descriptions with pictorial exemplars. The concept learning task was followed by a surprise recognition memory task for stimuli in the concept learning task in which the new stimuli were either old verbal descriptions with changed context or new verbal descriptions. Change in context for the former type of stimulus involved either a change of pictorial example, a switch from no example to some example, or a switch from a pictorial example to no example. Subjects were tested on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT), and measures of verbal ability (V) and quantitative ability (Q) were obtained. Recognition memory performance revealed very strong memory for context. Furthermore, when recognition memory performance for stimuli encountered before final error in concept identification was correlated with trial of last error on the concept identification task, the correlation was positive and significant. Thus, context memory seemed to impede the abstraction process significantly. Task strategy differences were not highly correlated with performance on EFT, V, and Q. However EFT, as a measure of field independence, was correlated with lower confidence ratings and faster latencies in the recognition memory task. Results were interpreted in terms of global processing in retrieval for field dependent subjects.