Reflective and Impulsive Children: Strategies of Information Processing Underlying Differences in Problem Solving

Abstract

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.

Impulsivity, Reflectivity, and High IQ

“…The present research suggests that high-ability impulsives are just as efficient as reflectives in performance on the PMA and its subtests. It lends support to Zelniker and Wendell's (1976) claim that fast-global processors are just as efficient as slow-analytic processors, depending on the nature of the task. lmpulsives and slow inaccurates on the MFF were just as successful as reflectives and fast accurates on the PMA (see Table 1).…”

What cognitive and affective states should technology monitor to support learning?

“…Indeed, in a study by [22], children who were impulsive performed significantly worse in arithmetic problem-solving tasks than their reflective peers. Impulsivity may be beneficial for tasks that require holistic processing [21] as was found in [23] where impulsive children were significantly more time efficient (and not inferior in accuracy) in a global matching task than the reflective.…”

“…There was no significant effect of this intervention for reflective children. This group may possibly benefit from intervention that facilitates learning and problem solving in holistic tasks which they find more challenging than analytical problems [21] although they can perform well in them [23]. Self-efficacy level could be used to determine if such intervention is required.…”

Bridging Cognition and Personality in Education: The Role of Style in Performance and Development

“…1977). One view of this style holds that reflective individuals tend to analyze stimuli into component features, whereas impulsives treat the stimulus as a whole (Zelniker &Jeffrey, 1976, 1979. Another view maintains that impulsives are not only holistic but also less strategically oriented and less resource intensive in using their cognitive repertoire in Information processing (Kemler Nelson & Smith, 1989).…”