Integral And Local Thinking Style ERP Research

Thinking styles, as one important domain of intellectual styles, have demonstrated significant incremental validity for predicting and understanding individual behaviors in literature. Based on the Sternberg’s(1997) mental self-government model, both global style preferred whole processing strategy and local style preferred analytic processing strategy were examined with measuring ERP to verify the validation of thinking style construct.Therefore, the study holds following hypothesis: 1 the reaction time and accuracy of global- local thinking styles were significantly difference in letter recognition and face recognition tasks. 2 the reaction(ERP components) of global-local thinking styles in letter recognition and face recognition tasks were significantly different. This study achieves the above objectives by the following two experiments.Experiment 1: different thinking styles identify the differences on the tasks of words combinations. This study using TSI-R2(Thinking Style Inventory-Revised II)selected the global and local thinking styles higher score in the two groups to ERP experiments from Shanghai Normal University(global thinking style higher score group and local thinking style higher score group each 13).It through different task requirements of letters recognition, analyses the reaction time and accuracy of global and local thinking style in choosing whole or partial task, analyses the different amplitude and latency of both N270(ERP components).Experiment 2: different thinking styles identify the faces on the tasks. When present different faces, there are different in the reaction time and accuracy of different thinking styles choosing faces or features(eyes) of task requirements,analyses the different amplitude and latency of N170(ERP components). This study reached the following results:(1) In the tasks of word recognition, significant differences were found in the accuracy of choosing large letters or small letters between the global and local thinkers, but not in the reaction time. Specifically, there is a significant difference in the amplitude and latency of N270(ERP component) between two types of thinkers.(2) In the tasks of face recognition, significant differences were supported in the reaction time of choosing faces or features(eyes) between the global and localthinkers, but not in the accuracy. However, a global thinker showed significantly shorter latency of N170(ERP component) than did a local thinker.Through the exploration of ERP components of the global and local thinking styles, the study supports the evaluation of the scale of thinking style from the perspective of neural physiology. The findings provide experimental evidence for the in-depth understanding of the connotation and internal processing mechanism of thinking style.