Cognitive Styles on Media and Technology Usage and Attitude

Abstract

People began to spend more time with devices as technology developed. The increasingly widespread use of technology in daily life has triggered new studies on this subject. Evaluated as a personal attribute, cognitive style affects individual behavior in all aspects of life. Nowadays, in parallel to the increased use of media and technology, it has become of interest how this personal attribute affects the use of media and technology. Actually, the ways people use technology indicate or affected by their cognitive styles. This study aims at determining the relationships between the cognitive styles of university students and the manners they use technology and media. The student participants were selected from social science departments (total of 94 students from the departments of psychology, sociology, and philosophy) and the Computer Technology and Information Systems (CTIS) department (total of 74 students). Of the 171 participants, 94 were female and 77 were male and their ages ranged from 19 to 27 (mean = 21.08; sd = 1.35). The participants were given a parallel form of the Cognitive Style Analysis (CSA) test on a computer and then were asked to complete the media and technology usage and manners scale. According to the results of analyses, social science students were found to be leaning towards verbal cognitive style, whereas the CTIS students tended to the visual cognitive style. In addition, the participants with the analytic cognitive style preference were found to have more social network friends than those who leaned towards the holistic cognitive style. Overall findings indicate that analytic cognitive style is associated with tendency to socialize in using media and technology, whereas the holistic cognitive style is associated with individualistic tendencies.