[Robustness of the analytic/holistic processing strategies in various cognitive tasks]

Robustness of the analytic/holistic processing strategies was examined in various cognitive tasks. The tasks in Experiment I were to classify facial patterns and verbal materials of different category structures into two categories. Stimuli were presented either with (thematization condition) or without a theme. Three types of strategies were discerned; consistently-analytic, consistently-holistic and optimal shifting. Experiment II was designed to test their performance in the Kagan type perceptual and memory identification tasks. The results from the two experiments showed that about 30% of the subjects adhered to either analytic or holistic strategy across tasks and experiments. They exhibited responses similar to the reflective and impulsive types. Approximately 40% of the subjects adjusted their strategies according to the task demands.