Do People with Varying Cognitive Styles Access Semantic Knowledge Differently?

The sensory/functional theory, which was originally proposed by Warrington and Shallice (1984), makes two crucial assumptions about the organization of the semantic system and the structure of semantic categories: The first assumption is that the semantic system is organized into modality-specific components, of which the most important are the visual and the functional/associative components. The second is that activation of either the visual or functional properties of an object will result in the activation of that object's properties in the other network. This means that independently of whether questions are asked about the visual or the functional attributes of an object, all of the semantic attributes of the object will be activated. On the other hand, people are known to differ in their cognitive style (e.g. visual/semantic). The current research explored whether these two groups of different cognitive-styled people (visual/semantic) use different approaches in retrieving information from semantic knowledge.