Measuring the relationships of task and cognitive style factors and their effects on individual decision-making effectiveness using a geographic information system

The authors investigated how two individual cognitive style factors, field dependence and need for cognition, relate to decision-making performance for a spatial task, with the intent of establishing a methodology for measuring cognitive fitness for such spatial tasks. A laboratory experiment was designed and carried out to test 142 subjects´ performance on a site location task where the problem complexity and the availability of a geographic information system were each manipulated on two levels. Significant relationships were found for both field dependence and need for cognition with the two dependent performance variables, solution time and error rate