Individual differences due to cognitive attributes
Answers
Individual Differences in Cognition
Ability Differences
Cognitive Styles
Learning Styles
Expert/Novice Differences
The Effects of Aging on Cognition
Gender Differences in Cognition
Gender Differences in Skills and Abilities
Verbal Abilities
Visuospatial Abilities
Quantitative and Reasoning Abilities
Gender Differences in Learning and Cognitive Styles
Motivation for Cognitive Tasks
Connected Learning
Verbal comprehension—Understand words, sentences, paragraphs.
Sensitivity to problems—Suggest ways to solve problems.
Syllogistic reasoning—Draw conclusions from premises.
Number facility—Compute arithmetic operations.
Induction—Indicate a principle of relations.
General reasoning—Find solutions to algebraic problems.
Associative memory—Recall associated element when given another element.
Span memory—Immediately recall a set of elements after one presentation.
Associational fluency—Produce words similar in meaning to a given word.
Expressional fluency—Produce different ways of saying the same thing.
Spontaneous flexibility—Produce diverse functions and classifications for an
object.
Perceptual speed—Find instances of a pattern under speeded conditions.
Visualization—Mentally manipulate forms to visualize how they would look.
Spatial orientation—Visually imagine parts out of place and put them in place.
Length estimation—Estimate lengths or distances between points.
The point here is that people (both adults and children) can vary in many ways.
1. Cognition might not always operate the same way for all people. Potential sources of variation in the way people approach
the cognitive tasks in their lives include individual differences in cognitive abilities, cognitive styles, and expertise as well as
age and gender.
2. Individuals apparently differ in their cognitive abilities, especially in such things as mental speed, storage capacity, and
attention span. Some psychologists equate these cognitive abilities with intelligence. Other cognitive psychologists do not
equate the two but see cognitive abilities as a part of intelligence. Still other psychologists reject the idea that there is one
single thing called intelligence.
3. In addition, people can have different cognitive approaches to, or styles in regard to, different tasks. Two of the most
investigated cognitive stylistic dimensions are field dependence/field independence and reflectivity/impulsivity. Whether the
two dimensions are unrelated and the degree to which cognitive styles are modifiable are two important questions for future
research.
4. People’s expertise can affect the ways they approach a cognitive task within their domain of expertise. Experts perceive
more distinctions and categorize information differently than novices. Experts can use their domain-related knowledge to
chunk information so as to use their memories more effectively.
5. Age-related changes in cognitive processing do not disappear during adolescence; adults of different ages show some
systematic differences in cognitive performance. Older adults perform slightly less well than younger adults on tasks of
divided attention and working memory, for instance, perhaps because of a general decline in processing speed.
6. Research on gender differences in cognition is very active; therefore, any conclusions must necessarily be tentative. Currently,
it seems safe to say that with regard to ability, the overall patterns of performance of men and women, or of boys and girls,
are far more similar than different except on very specific tasks.
7. Another set of questions has to do with gender differences in cognitive style or approach. The issue here is whether females
and males adopt different strategies in the ways they gather, process, or evaluate information. Carol Dweck’s work suggests
that boys and girls adopt different approaches to cognitive tasks, with girls tending to adopt a more “helpless” outlook,
especially in the face of failure. It is not yet clear how girls and boys come to adopt different strategies, although Dweck’s
work implicates the typical patterns of feedback teachers give to boys and girls. We can speculate that these kinds of
feedback may also come from other agents of socialization—parents, siblings, peers, and others—but the evidence on this
question remains to be gathered.
8. Proposals from feminist research suggest that cognitive gender differences might occur not on very specific tasks but rather
on broad approaches to cognition itself. Future work must establish how different the “ways of knowing” are for people
of different genders and must investigate how these differences in approach might translate into performance on specific
cognitive tasks. It will also be important to assess the effect of gender independent of other demographic variables such as
socioeconomic status, level of education, and cultural heritage.
Individual differences due to cognitive attributes are explained below :
- According to psychologists classified under two sections , i.e , individual differences in abilities and individual abilities in style.
- The first section deals with individual differences within certain abilities.
- It specifies the certain abilities to perform some specific cognitive tasks.
- The next section , i.e , individual differences according to style specifies about a good behaviour and manners which is required to perform cognitive tasks.