Do cognitive styles of users affect preference and performance related to CAPTCHA challenges?

Abstract

A Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is nowadays a widely used security mechanism for constructing a high-confidence proof that the entity interacting with a remote service is actually a human being. Aiming to investigate the relation among users' cognitive styles, and CAPTCHA challenges in terms of preference and performance, a study is in progress which entails a psychometric-based survey for extracting users' cognitive styles, combined with a real usage scenario with two variations of CAPTCHA mechanisms. A total of 131 participants of age between 19 and 25 participated in the reported study providing interesting insights with respect to users' cognitive styles and CAPTCHA preference and performance issues.