Cognitive Styles in HCI Education and Practice

This project examines the cognitive profile of the HCI professional with the view of providing a benchmark against which to compare HCI students. 134 professionals responded to an online survey which captured their individual cognitive style using Hayes and Allinson’s Cognitive Style Index and Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov’s Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire. Some of these were HCI practitioners in the field, some were educators, and some were both practitioner and educator. It was expected that successful HCI practitioners would fall somewhere within the 60% of the population who are categorised as “quasi intuitive”, “adaptive” or “quasi analyst” and that they would score more highly as an object-imager than an engineer or computer scientist, and more highly as a spatial-imager than a visual artist. Preliminary results partially support this. The profile of the educator is clearly distinct from that of the practitioner professional which may have implications for the delivery of the curriculum.