conditioning, etc.). Piaget spelled out a list of "formal operations," such as modus ponens, the probability schema, etc., which he regarded as the fundamental deductive and inductive rule schemas necessary to understand the world. The cognitive revolution, from its earliest incarnation in the work of such theorists as George Miller and Herbert Simon, until nearly the end of the 20 century, essentially embraced Piaget's position of extreme formalism and content independence of inferential rules. Cognitive scientists' endorsement of the formalist, universalistic position was undoubtedly encouraged by the analogy between the human mind and the computer: brain = hardware, cognitive procedures = operating principles and factory-installed software (Block, 1995). This analogy both encouraged the universality assumption and discouraged any assumption that cognitive procedures might be alterable. The heuristics and biases movement of Kahneman and Tversky (1974) and their colleagues in social

this paper. Correspondence should be addressed to M. J. Dennis, Madsen Center, Augustana College, 2001 S. Summit Ave., Sioux Falls, SD 57197 (e-mail: dennis@inst.augie . edu)

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East Asian cognition has been held to be relatively "holistic", that is, attention is paid to the field as a whole. Western cognition, in contrast, has been held to be object-focused and control-oriented. We compared East Asians (mostly Chinese) and Americans on detection of covariation and field dependence. The results showed that (1) Chinese participants reported stronger association between events, were more responsive to differences in covariation, and were more confident about their covariation judgments; (2) These cultural differences disappeared when participants believed they had some control over the covariation judgment task; (3) American participants made fewer mistakes on the Rod-and-Frame test, indicating that they were less field dependent; (4) American performance and confidence, but not that of Asians, increased when participants were given manual control of the test. Possible origins of the perceptual differences are discussed. Characters (with spaces): 958 3 Scholars ...

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical " reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction. The British empiricist philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, including Locke, Hume, and Mill, wrote about cognitive processes as if they were the same for all normal adults. This assumption of universality was adopted by mainstream psychology of the 20th century, where it has been predominant from the earliest treatment of cognitive psychology by Piaget, to midcentury learning theorists, to modem cognitive science. The assumption