This study is focussed on the Reflective and Impulsive children's cognitive coping strategies on MFF (Matching Familiar Figures), that is, on the visual searching behavior of Reflective and Impulsive children.
And doing so, this study is aimed at clarifying the mechanisms of emerging differences based on their performances, which were the criterion of classifying Reflectives and Impulsives on their RT and errors.
The experimental procedures were as follows. They were comprised of two sessions.
The 1st. session: The Ss, 69 3rd grade children (34 boys, 35 girls) were given MFF and were classified as Reflective or Impulsive, and rest of the group were children who recieved median scores on their RT and errors.
The 2nd. session: The salient Reflective and Impulsive Ss were selected (table 2), and they were individually administered the MFF II, which was devised to probe the searching behavior of Reflective and Impulsive children (Fig. 2). Here, each S was instructed to turn up covers and see pictures at any time and in any order he liked, but he was not allowed to gaze at two or more stimuli at once.
One experimenter administered this test and recorded the sequential order of selected variants, and another experimenter recorded the duration of their looking behavior.
The main results were as follows.
1. Reflectives deployed the more active visual' scanning and their mean scores of frequency and' duration of attention to standard and variant (alternative) stimuli were much larger, compared with Impulsives. According to the record of total processing (until they found a right variant), these tendencies remained constant.
2. As the number of variants assigned to the task were increased, Reflective Ss had a significantly higher mean number of variants which were gazed at at least one or more times, but Impulsive Ss had few gains irrespective of the number of variants presented to them (Table 4, Fig. 4).
3. By analysing the processes of selection of the first variant through comparing with other variants, it was suggested that Reflective and Impulsive Ss had different search strategies. That is, Reflectives were inclined to employ the strategy of elimination in which they continued to exclude irrelevant variants until they found the only one right variant. Compared with this, Impulsives were likely to take the one-to-one matching to sample strategy.
4. In addition to these facts, it was supposed that Impulsives were not necessarily the fast thinkers, but they apparently could not process more information quickly because of their lesser processing capacity limits, or because they had different subjective certainty level in contrast to that of Reflectives.
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