A Cross-Cultural Study Of Cognitive Styles And Pictures To The Effects Of Implicit And Explicit Memory

In this paper, we investigate the effect of individual difference of cognitive styles (the types of field dependence—and of field independence) and different encoding forms related to recognition materials (concrete pictures, abstract pictures) to explicit/ implicit memory, proceed comparative research between nationalities. We choose 96 junior middle school students from four nationalities as testees, adapting materials with characteristics of different encoding forms, applying PDP in order to separate consciousness part and unconsciousness part from a single memory task, and analyze the grades of consciousness abstract and automatic abstract by GLM—Repeated factorial, we find:1,Whether explicit memory or implicit memory, the memory grade of concrete pictures are always much better than the memory grade of abstract pictures, we obtain from our research that the characteristics (such as name, concept, categorical relation, etc.) of concrete pictures are abundant than that of abstract pictures, and the characteristics of concrete pictures stand on a higher lever than abstract pictures do; for concrete pictures, these characteristics are more suitable for the testee's old memory, his/her pattern recognition and restatement. The storage of concrete pictures in the brain is more effective than that of abstract pictures. The effective storage of concrete pictures makes abstract (whether the abstract is conscious, or unconscious—automatic abstract) obtaining more results than abstract pictures do, so that the recognition grades of concrete pictures are much better than that of abstract pictures.2, For the people who belong to the type of field dependence, there is no remarkable effect of individual difference of cognitive styles to implicit memory; but there is a remarkable effect of individual difference of cognitive styles to explicit memory. Comparing to the people who belong to the type of field dependence, we obtain from our research that the people who belong to the type of field independence having more powerful analysis which is suitable for concept encoding task; the analysis is needed in the process of pictorial information going into long-time memory. Therefore the memory grade of the people who belong to the type of field independence is better than the memory grade of the people who belong to the type of field dependence. It seems that to proceed conceptive analysis to pictorial information involve much consciousness, the advantage of analysis of the man who belong to the type of field independence does not appear in the level of unconscious implicit memory.