Individual Differences in Cognition: New Methods for Examining the Personality-Cognition Link.

Understanding how all people are the same, some are the same, and yet none are the same is a fundamental challenge to personality and individual differences theorists in particular and psychologists in general (Kluckhohn & Murray, 1953; Revelle, 1995). Unfortunately, there is little work that actually addresses the challenge of Kluckhohn and Murray. As is true for the rest of psychology, there is a strong trend toward fragmentation of the field of individual differences. Particularly in the United States, there is a tendency in personality and individual differences toward the lack of integration of theories of (non-cognitive) personality dimensions with individual differences in cognition. The chapters of this book are partly meant to rectify this shortcoming. We will do our part by reviewing some of the prior research on the effects of non-cognitive variables upon cognition and then introduce a new procedure, ˵Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment″ (SAPA) as a tool for exploring cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]