Reflective and impulsive children: strategies of information processing underlying differences in problem solving

The hypothesis that impulsive children differ from reflective children in their preferred strategy of information processing, based on extent of stimulus analysis, was investigated. The experiments employed different age groups and a variety of tasks, including matching, grouping, recall, and concept attainment. Stimuli were presented both visually and auditorily and included both visually and aduitorily and included both verbal and pictorial matrials. The tasks required verbal and nonverbal responses and varied in the level of stimulus analysis necessary for successful performance. The subjects' strategy was assessed by the quality of their performance on tasks requiring detail versus global processing, and by the strategy they chose to adopt in tasks where either detail or global processing led to successful performance. While reflective children performed better on tasks requiring detail analysis than on tasks requiring global analysis, impulsive children showed the reverse trend. Furthermore, when successful solutions could be reached via either a global- or a detail-processing strategy, impulsive children who adopted the former were equally as successful as reflective children who adopted the latter strategy. It was concluded that, contrary to existing views, impulsive children are not inferior to reflective children in general potential or problem-solving ability. Rather, the inferior performance of impulsive children frequently reported in the literature may be due to incompatibility between their preferred global-processing strategy and the detail analysis typically required for successful performance.