46 male college students were administered both the Rod-and-frame test (RFT) and a learning task, consisting of learning the nonsense-syllable “names” arbitrarily assigned to a series of complex designs. RFT performance was unrelated to learning the names of the over-all designs, but good performance on the RFT was associated with better ability to identify part-aspects of the designs. Results were discussed in terms of the greater ability of field-independent individuals to extract aspects of their experience from an embedding context, as well as their greater task orientation.
