Impulsivity, interference on perceptual tasks and hypothesis testing

Dickman (1990) proposed two types of impulsive personality, functional and dysfunctional, and it has been suggested that these types are associated with different information processing styles on cognitive decision-making tasks. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether these different cognitive styles would be apparent on two simple perceptual tasks involving abilities to recognize ambiguous figures and find camouflaged figures, and one hypothesis generation task. Results showed that dysfunctional impulsivity was associated only with recognition of fewer ambiguous figures. In contrast, functional impulsivity was associated with superior recognition of the camouflage figures, and was significantly positively correlated with the number of responses generated on the hypothesis generation task. It is argued that these results are broadly consistent with the view that dysfunctional impulsivity is associated with an inability to inhibit competing responses, whereas functional impulsivity is associated with speed of information processing. However, there are indications that, on some tasks, the two tendencies may have moderating effects on each other.