 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Experimental and Theoretical Psychology
KOGNI Program Description
KOGNI: Computation of Measures of Cognitive Complexity
Background
The determination of a person's cognitive complexity is not an easy task. One classical method for this purpose is the one proposed by Scott (1962). He used the "Object Sorting Test" (OST) for a quantification of subject's cognitive complexity. In the OST, subjects sort a given (or self-generated) list of objects according to their own ideas. The task is to produce as many different groupings as possible. For example, a list of countries has to be sorted and subjects sort them into different (sub-)groups, like EU, NATO, third-world, etc.. The structure of this sorting procedure is the database for KOGNI.
KOGNI2
KOGNI is a program for computing the measures of cognitive
complexity described by Scott (1962) and by Hussy (1977). Originally written by
Joachim Funke 1977 in
FORTRAN (see Funke et al., 1978), it was due to a request from Manfred Amelang
(Psychology
Department, University of Heidelberg) 1995 re-written by Thomas Krüger in
TurboPascal. The program [15 KB] can be downloaded by anonymous file transfer under the name kogni.zip from the following directory:
(
ftp://ftp.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/pub/institute/psychologie/).
For users who don't understand the German help file KOGNI.TXT (which is enclosed in the zipped version) we have prepared a special instruction page.
References
Hussy, W. (1977). Ein Beitrag zur Operationalisierung und Quantifizierung kognitiver Komplexität. Archiv für Psychologie, 129, 288-301.
Scott, W.A. (1962). Cognitive complexity and cognitive flexibility. Sociometry, 25, 405-414.
 Top |
Last modified on 03.12.2003 by JF. |