Herman Witkin

rdf:langString Herman Witkin

rdf:langString Herman A. Witkin (2 August 1916 – 8 July 1979) was an American psychologist who pioneered the development of cognitive theories, especially as they pertained to learning. While many cognitive psychologists diagnosed learning disabilities with questionnaires, he preferred projective tests and problem-solving exercises. He proposed the concept of field-dependency vs. field-independency. The majority of Witkin's research was done during his tenures at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center College of Medicine in Brooklyn, New York, and at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked until his death in 1979. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Witkin as the 96th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Witkin studied differences in perceptual style for almost 30 years. His first book was titled Personality Through Perception (1954). The idea in this book was that personality can be revealed through differences in how people perceive their environment. Witkin was at first interested in the cues that people use in judging orientation in space. What makes one know that what one sees is a tilted object and that it is not you who are tilted? For one to find a conclusion, one examines other objects in the surroundings.