Personality and Information Processing: A Cognitive-Adaptive Theory

Personality and Information Processing: Accomplishments and Challenges

Personality research woke up to the cognitive revolution rather late in the day. Pioneering psychobiological trait theorists, notably Hans Eysenck, introduced experiments that related traits to performance tasks requiring attention, [Page 57]memory and other cognitive functions. However, psychobiological theory treated cognition as an outcome of more fundamental neurological processes, rather than a causal influence on behavior. Carl Rogers and George Kelly highlighted the defining role of cognition in molding personality, but without computational models, such approaches lacked the rigor to build a systematic account of the major personality traits.

Several developments jump-started cognitive psychological accounts of traits. In psychometrics, researchers began to look beyond the traditional traits to identify dimensions that were defined by primarily cognitive qualities such as locus of control and dispositional focus of attention. In clinical psychology, Beck (1967) introduced the idea of the schema to explain depression, suggesting that personality reflects an organized, stable set of self-beliefs. In time, schema theory would help to explain traits linked to negative affectivity such as anxiety and neuroticism (Wells and Matthews, 1994). Experimental psychology provided new chronometric paradigms for relating traits to information processing. Michael Eysenck (1981), for example, reviewed studies relating extraversion to standard information-processing tasks such as attention, memory, speeded response, motor skills, problem-solving and strategy choice. Critically, such studies freed cognitive investigations from their reliance on self-report data, in favor of objective measures of speed and accuracy in performance. Humphreys and Revelle (1984) developed the first systematic account of how the major traits influenced a range of different tasks, mediated by individual differences in the availability of processing resources for attention and short-term memory.

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