01:830:338 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Field Dependence, Social Learning Theory, Human Nature

• School: Rutgers University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: 01:830:338
• Professor: Professor Lyra Stein

Document Summary

Cognition refers to awareness and thinking as well as to specific mental acts such as perceiving, interpreting, remembering, believing, anticipating. Three levels of cognition of interest to personality psychologists. Perception: process of imposing order on information received by our sense organs. Interpretation: process of making sense of, or explaining, events in the world. Beliefs and desires: standards and goals people develop for evaluating themselves and others. Field independent (relative to field dependent) people have the ability to focus on details despite the clutter of background information. Education: field independent people favor natural sciences, math, engineering, whereas field dependent people favor social sciences and education. Interpersonal relations: field independent people are more interpersonally detached, whereas field dependent people are attentive to social cues, oriented toward other people. Field independent people are better able to screen out distracting information and focus on a task. Field-independent students learn more effectively than field dependent students in hypermedia-based instructional environment.