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Cognitive Styles 29

The term Perceiver can refer to either:

1. The person who has the cognitive style of Perceiver.
    The Perceiver person is one of the seven possible cognitive styles.
    He is conscious in the Perceiver mode of thought.


2. The part of the mind which carries out Perceiver strategy.
    Every person has this mode of thought.
    In those who are not Perceivers, this mode is subconscious.

The terms analytical, associative, abstract, concrete, emotion and
confidence are very fundamental to this theory. They are also used widely
in both psychology and in common speech, and I have explained them in
the glossary. However, let us see if we can define them a little more
precisely in the light of some examples.
I mentioned that the left axis of concrete and abstract refers to two
different kinds of information or memory: Concrete thinking looks at
experiences and objects in the real world. When you tell a concrete thinker
an idea, for instance, he will ask for an example. For him, everything is
interpreted by experiences. Mention the word „car,‟ and the 1973 green
Honda Civic with the dent in the left door may come to his mind. „Love‟
may mean the special card, hug and visit that he received after learning of
his father‟s death.
An abstract thinker, in contrast, deals with ideas and concepts. Put him
in the 1973 green Honda Civic and he will think of transportation, and the
effect that the automobile has had upon twentieth century society. Mention
the word love and you may start an intellectual discussion about the
benefits of emotional bonding in times of crisis.
Now turn to the top axis of analytical and associative. Each describes a
different type of thinking. Let us contrast these two ways of mental
processing, first by comparing a list of characteristics, and then with the
help of an illustration.

Speech is a good example of analytical processing. Neurology tells us
that the left hemisphere is responsible for producing words and sentences.
Notice that a sentence is a sequence of words which are connected together
and spoken over time. When a person speaks a word or a sentence, his
mouth makes a succession of verbal sounds which we call speech: “H-e-ll-
o...h-o-w...a-re...y-ou.”
Words are not chosen at random. Rather, each word has a specific
meaning which determines where that particular sequence of acoustic noise
can be applied. For instance, we all know when and where to say the word
„fire.‟
Finally, speech is full of general patterns and order. Sounds are formed
into words using rules of phonetics: We can be quite certain that the
sequence “qthc” will never show up in an English word, and be equally