Event-related potentials in adolescents with different cognitive styles: field dependence and field independence

Field dependence/independence (FD/FI) is an important dimension of personality and cognitive styles. Different ability in mobilizing and/or allocating mental-attentional capacity was considered to be the most possible explanation for the FDI cognitive style. Many studies on characterizing the functional neuroanatomy of attentional control indicated the existence of a dissociable sub-process of conflict-monitoring and "cognitive control" system. However, little was known about it. We might dissociate "cognitive control" system from conflict processing by taking advantage of the variable of the FDI cognitive style. In addition, essentially cognitive styles (FDI) are often widely studied in psychological and educational fields, but hardly in neuroscience. We speculated that ERP components could help to explain the difference between how FD and FI individuals process information. The purpose of the reported study was to explore the possible relation between the "cognitive control" system and the conflict processing system during stimulus-matching task. We first characterized the standard FD/FI of senior-high-school Han students in grade two in Beijing, China, based on 160 students with similar age, education, living and cultural background. Twenty-six adolescents were selected and divided into two groups (extreme FD group and extreme FI group) according to their Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) results (FD: 5-8; FI: 17-19). They were tested on both Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and stimulus-matching task. ERP was measured while the subjects performed the stimulus-matching tasks by categorizing two figures that were presented sequentially either as a match (same shape) or as a conflict (different shape) conditions. The results showed that the mean amplitude of N270 in FI group was higher relative to that in FD group at nearly all centrofrontal areas in the conflict condition. We conclude that the FDI cognitive styles could influence the conflict processing by the "cognitive control" system due to the different abilities of FD and FI subjects in mobilizing and/or allocating attentional resources, which can be indexed by N270.