ABSTRACT
Educators have gained a new interest in theories of personality as they have intensified their efforts to understand the relationship between the individual characteristics of learners and their approach to learning. The theory of psychological types developed by C. G. Jung * seems to the authors to be particularly significant for understanding learning behavior, for it poses a conceptualization of the interrelationships among personality dynamics, cognitive style and cognitive processes. The four psychological functions and the two basic attitudes of the psyche hypothesized in the theory represent means by which individuals organize their worlds. The perception functions of sensing and intuition describe the psychological style by which individuals prefer to attend to information in their environment. The judging functions of thinking and feeling describe strategies individuals use in selectively responding to the information to which they prefer to pay the most attention. The attitudes of introversion and extraversion identify the sources of information that tend to command the attention of the individual. Variations in the relative strengths of these factors produce highly individualized ways by which persons adapt themselves to their worlds. Learning, being central to the process of adaptation, may be strongly affected by these qualitative differences in orienting strategies.
