Herman Witkin

Herman A. Witkin (2 August 1916 – 8 July 1979) was an American psychologist who specialized in the spheres of cognitive psychology and learning psychology. He was a pioneer of the theory of cognitive styles and learning styles (developed in cooperation with Solomon Asch, Donald Goodenough etc.). He preferred to diagnose not by questionnaires but by other means, such as projective tests, task-solving tests etc. He was the author of the concept of field-dependency vs. field-independency. The majority of Witkin's research was done during his tenures at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center College of Medicine in Brooklyn, NY and at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked until his death in 1979. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Witkin as the 96th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Herman Witkin studied differences in perceptual style for almost 30 years. His first book was titled Personality Through Perception (1954). The idea in this book was that personality can be revealed through differences in how people perceive their environment. Witkin was at first interested in the cues that people use in judging orientation in space. What makes one know that what one sees is a tilted object and that it is not you who are tilted? For one to find a conclusion, one examines other objects in the surroundings.

In 1948, Witkin and Asch developed an apparatus called the Rod and Frame Test (RFT). When using the RFT, the participant sits in a darkened room where he or she receives instructions about watching a glowing rod surrounded by a glowing square frame. The researcher can manipulate both the rod, the frame and the participant's chair in different angles of tilts. The participant is then instructed to adjust the rod so that the rod is perfectly upright. For the participant to be able to do this, he/she has to ignore cues in the visual field. If the participant adjusts the rod so that it is leaning in the direction of the tilted frame, then that person is said to be dependent on the visual field. This person will be categorized as field-dependent. On the other side there will be people who are field-independent. These people will disregard the external cues, and use information from their bodies in adjusting the rod to appear upright. Field-independent people seem to rely on their own sensations instead of the perception of the field, to make a judgment.

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