Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Following the recent suggestion (Hockey, in press) that cognitive science has much to gain from consideration of variability in cognitive functioning, this paper addresses the question of what aspects of memory performance underlie differences in cognitive style' such as 'Ambiguity Tolerance'. Subjects allocated to 'tolerant' and 'intolerant' groups on the basis of a traditional pencil & paper measure of 'Ambiguity tolerance' took part in a conceptual editing task which required them to disregard information learnt on a previous occasion. The results of the study show significant differences between groups, both in terms of recall and discrimination, and are interpreted as supporting the view that Ambiguity tolerance effects result from differences in the organisation and availability of the underlying conceptual representation.