Abstract

This paper reports on a series of experiments that examine the effect of cognitive style on the performance of subjects in tasks using different types of media. Performance is defined as a ratio of score over duration. A series of experiments were devised to test the performance of each cognitive style group in a range of tasks using audio, text, images, text plus images, and video. Tasks were categorised in terms of which cognitive style groups are expected to perform best. The relative performance of cognitive style groups for different styles of task were compared within each type of media and between each type of media. General Linear Model Univariate calculations were performed to determine whether the cognitive style groups performed significantly different from each other within each media and t-tests for related samples calculations were carried out to determine whether the performance of the cognitive style groups were significantly different between different media. Cognitive style was found to affect performance but not within all types of media and not always in the expected manner. Comparing the performance of the cognitive style groups between the media it is possible to identify the types of media that are more suitable for each cognitive style group.