Who Sees Trees Before Forest? - The Personality Project

The Obsessive-Compulsive Cognitive Stylehierarchical stimuli (the small letters, or the trees) when tryingto identify their global aspects (the big letter, or forest). Thesefindings provide the first empirical support for the detail-orientedobsessive-compulsive attentional style (Shapiro, 1965).In contrast, the current study failed to support Shapiro’s histrioniccognitive style because HPD-related measures were notassociated with global visual attention.Previous studies using the global-local paradigm may havefailed to provide support for the obsessive-compulsive cognitivestyle because they examined only the global-interference andglobal-precedence effects (Dickman, 1985; Maynard & Meyer,1996). However, the local-interference effect, which reflectsexcessive attention to details that interferes with task completion,seems to be the effect that is most directly and unambiguouslyrelated to the proposed obsessive-compulsive style.In contrast, none of the HPD-related scales correlated significantlywith any of the effects of the global-local task, particularlynot with the global-interference effect, even thoughthis effect seems to unambiguously operationalize the histrionicglobal information processing style. On a cautionary note, theseconclusions regarding both cognitive styles are limited tononclinical populations such as the one we examined. Scoringhigh on traits such as workaholism or perfectionism is not a signof any type of psychopathology, particularly not for collegestudents. In addition, the diagnostic scales for OCPD and HPDare not significantly correlated (r 5 .12, n.s.) and so should notbe regarded as opposite extremes of the same continuum (cf.McCrae et al., 2001; Reynolds & Clark, 2001). Therefore, eventhough the present findings indicate that individuals who scorelow on OCPD-related measures are less distracted by smalllocal details of stimuli than individuals who score high on thesemeasures, the results fail to support the hypothesized globalstyle of visual attention that was suggested to characterize HPD.In conclusion, by using a well-established cognitive measureof hierarchical visual attention, we showed that OCPD-relatedtraits were associated with excessive visual attention to smalldetails. 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