The Impact of Task and Cognitive Style on Decision-making Effectiveness Using a Geographic Information System

A laboratory experiment is conducted to investigate how two individual cognitive style factors, field dependence and need-for-cognition, relate to decision-making performance for a spatial task. The intent of the investigation is to establish a methodology for measuring cognitive fit for spatial tasks. The experiment assesses the performance of 142 subjects on a site location task where the problem complexity and availability of a geographic information system are manipulated on two levels. Significant relationships are found for both field dependence and need-for-cognition with the two dependent performance variables, solution time and percent error.