A Look at Cognitive Temp,: Review With Commentary

Abstract

There are various cognitive profiles that
may reveal themselves in one's
personality, social 'and intellectual
functionings. These include field
dependence-independence, focusnonfocus (scaniring), cognitive
complexity-simplicity, broad-narrow
(breadth of categorization), levelingsharpening, tolerant-mtolerant, and
reflectiveness-impulsivity (Letteri,
1980).
The reflectiveness-impulsiveness
dimension or cognitive tempo refers to a
child's tendency to respond slowly or
rapidly in a problem solving situation
which has high uncertainty. Reflective
and impulsive were terms ~ed by Kagan
and associates in 1964 to refer to two
types of information processing modes
among children. Who is a reflective
child and who is an impulsive one? The
identification of the two groups of
children is based upon performance
scores on a match-to-standard perceptual
recognition task called MFFT.