PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT AND SEXUALITY:
STUDIES ON COGNITIVE STYLES -I
There is a vast area of cognitive style that has been studied since Witkin’s and others’ pioneer study of adults’ field-dependent versus field-independent patterns of scanning. Studies on stable cognitive styles among individuals have been extended to children. The concept of cognitive style also has been widened to include not only field dependence-independence, but also reflection versus impulsivity (Kagan and others; Kagan and Messer), breadth of categorization (Gardner), and style of conceptualization (Kagan and others). The results of research on the nature of sex-type differences in cognitive styles among children are promising but not conclusive, for a number of reasons. First of all, children are not as verbal as adults—especially very young children. In addition, most studies on children’s cognitive styles lack methodological sophistication and therefore are usually the reflection of the investigators’ individual differences rather than the children’s.
Children are required to respond to certain limited stimuli provided by the investigator, rather than to behave autonomously and spontaneously, and except for a very few (Block and Block), most of these studies are carried out in research laboratories and do not take into consideration the actual performance of children in classrooms. Nevertheless, a general survey of the literature (Kogan) provides convincing information about the cognitive style differences among sexes. In one study Coates (as reported by Kogan) using the Articulation of the Body Concept (ABC) Test, based on the child’s ability to articulate an embedded figure, found that girls scored higher than did boys. It was concluded, with some misgivings, that not only field independence, but other cognitive styles appear earlier in females (four to five-year-olds) than in the control group of boys. In Oltman’s study, based on the responses of one hundred males and one hundred females between four and thirteen years of age to the Portable Rod and Frame Test, there was a significant increase in the field-independent functioning for both sexes as they became older. Within the preschool population of children, similar studies have detected a difference between the sexes in the developmental pattern of field-independent perceptual ability. It seems that girls are ahead of boys in this ability up to age four to five years, but boys surpass girls by the age of five to six years (Coates; Dermen and Meisner). This stability of field-independent function in boys over a period of time, as compared with its discontinuity in girls, is puzzling. It might have some relation to other variables, such as girls’ tendency to be more socially oriented and boys’ tendency to be more task-oriented, as suggested by some investigators (Coates and others).
*122/187/5*
