Adapting Witkin's Field Independence Theory to Accommodate New Information From Africa

Theories developed in America hold that the same cognitive style informs both the pattern of an individual's social relations and his performance in certain tests. The tests used in America have largely provided problems in a visual idiom. It is hypothesized that cultures found in Africa may attune skills relatively more highly in an auditory or proprioceptive, than in the visual sphere dominant in Euro‐American cultures. Results using a visual, and a mixed visual and proprioceptive test suggest a different pattern of response from African than from American subjects. This is taken to show that the sameness of cognitive style through all fields of an individual's behaviour may not occur for Africans as it may for Americans. Differences of cognitive style for proprioceptive problems may have their own correlates of social behaviour patterns, and these remain to be studied.