ABSTRACT
The notion of cognitive controls (also known as cognitive styles, perceptual attitudes, or patterns of adaptation) originated with Drs Riley Gardner, Philip Holzman, and George Klein, members of a group of psychoanalytically trained psychologists at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas (Gardner, Holzman, Klein, Linton, & Spence, 1959). In their work with patients at the Clinic, they observed that individuals developed particular cognitive strategies in order to perceive, process, integrate, or avoid, information from the environment in relation to their psychological needs. For example, they noted that some subjects, whom they called levelers, preferred to ignore or suppress differences in order to level all to uniformity. In consultation with these subjects' therapists, they learned that their subjects' perceptual attitudes when performing experimental tasks were consistent with their clinical behaviors. "The avoidance or minimizing of distinctions or nuances in the perceptual sphere thus seemed to have a parallel in an avoidance pattern in everyday behavior" (Klein, 1970, p. 142). In a recent study of predictors of music sight-reading ability in high school wind-players, levelers who scanned the music notation for repeated rhythmic figures scored higher on timed tests of sight-reading (Gromko, 2004). Because levelers minimize distinctions and nuances, they looked for patterns instead of reading note-to-note.
