The Relationship of Cognitive Style to the Perception and Usage of Color Images –a Content Design Consideration

⎯ With the rapid progression of e-learning curriculum, the various needs of content design considerations are increasing. However, little attention was paid to image perception issue related to content design. This study investigated the relationship of field-dependent/field-independent (FD/FI) cognitive style to the perception of color images with respect to colordepth and preference for display layouts. The GEFT was used to determine cognitive style, FD and FI. Ishihara's Test for ColorBlindness was used to detect any color vision deficiency. Cognitive style was the primary independent variable for color discrimination task and image retrieval task. The method of minimizing the influence of individual variation of FD/FI subjects was to compare the demographic factors and the treatments that may influence response. A correlational analysis was used to determine whether and to what degree, a relationship exists between two or more variables. Results of the study did not support the hypotheses that cognitive style would be the primary predictor of performance on the two tasks. No consistent effect due to cognitive style was found. However, results indicated that FD subjects were more affected by different treatments than were FI subjects. This finding supported previous studies that FD is an important instructional variable. Results from this study showed that different treatments did make differences between FD/FI for the preference of display layouts. Implications for curriculum and system design are proposed.