Herman Witkin

Who was Herman Witkin?

Herman A. Witkin was an American psychologist who specialized in the spheres of cognitive psychology and learning psychology. He was a pioneer of the theory of cognitive styles and learning styles. He preferred to diagnose not by questionnaires but by more objective means, such as projective tests, task-solving tests etc. He was the author of 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, NY and at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked until his death in 1979.

Herman Witkin studied differences in perceptual style for almost 30 years. His first book was titled Personality Through Perception. 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.