Cognitive Styles and Experience in Solving Insight Problems: Replication and Extension

Abstract

This study replicated and extended a previous finding of a joint effect between cognitive styles and real-life problem-solving experience indicating that experience may have a facilitating or inhibiting effect on problem solving depending on the cognitive style orientation. Subjects were 179 female and 96 male students from senior high schools in Norway. Dependent tasks were five analytic insight problems. The results supported the hypothesis that assimilators perform better with a high level of relevant experience and explorers perform better at a low level of experience. A curvilinear relation between the assimilator-explorer styles and problems solving was also obtained. Both this effect and the joint effect were present when controlling for general intelligence and gender.