Denis Corroyer

Strategy development in a block design task

Abstract For 90 subjects aged 12, 17, and adult, strategy development was studied in a computerized task derived from Kohs blocks. The effect of a structural variable was tested: the nature of the gestalts (triangles or stripes) in the test designs. Based on the automatic analysis of several behavior indices, three strategies were identified: global and analytic, but also “synthetic,” in which the subject solved the problem by relying on gestalts. The results showed that (1) younger subjects more often used the global strategy and (2) designs with stripes turned out to be far more complex than ones with triangles, especially for the younger subjects. The results are discussed in the light of recent work in cognitive and developmental psychology.

Cognitive Processes in the Reflective-Impulsive Cognitive Style

In this study, the authors improved the understanding of the cognitive processes underlying the reflective-impulsive cognitive style (RI), which was initially measured by J. Kagan, B. L. Rosman, D. Day, J. Albert, and W. Phillips (1964) on the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT). The authors determined the relationships between the RI style and the cognitive factors, which would be likely to explain different MFFT solving modes-field dependence or independence as a cognitive style, the g factor, the spatial factor, and a metacognitive control index, which the authors developed for this study. The hypotheses were largely based on various studies (J. P. Ancillotti, 1984, 1985; J. Kagan, B. L. Rosman, D. Day, J. Albert, & W. Phillips, 1964; T. Zelniker & W. E. Jeffrey, 1976; T. Zelniker, A. Renan, I. Sorer, & Y. Shavit, 1977). The results are presented separately for each of four groups: (a) reflective individuals, who implement an analytic process and are cognitively mature; (b) impulsive individuals, who use a holistic process and are cognitively immature; (c) fast-accurate individuals, who are capable of implementing both analytic and holistic processes and exhibit cognitive maturity; and (d) slow-inaccurate individuals, who exhibit good metacognitive control but have trouble implementing both types of processing.

Organization of metacognitive knowledge: A condition for strategy use in memorization

In this research, we study acquisition and maintenance of a categorization strategy for item recall. 56 children, aged 6 to 8 years, who do not spontaneously use such a strategy during a pretest are given a training session with feed-back. The experimental procedure involves asking subjects before the post-test to give a description of the training session: this description may be considered as reflecting the representation of the relation between strategy use and recall performance (i.e. the metacognitive knowledge), as it is available at the time of the post-test phase. Our results clarify the conditions under which metacognitive knowledge about the relations between goals, strategies and acquired performance can be re-used in the solution of different but analogous tasks. Thus, only those subjects who can use information provided during training to construct metacognitive knowledge that is both generalizable, and refers to functional relations between means and ends, are able to re-use the acquired strategy. We believe that the construction of such forms of metacognitive knowledge implies two distinct processes of cognitive reorganization. However the question of what distinguishes subjects who can successfully proceed with this cognitive reorganization from others remains open.