General principles:
There are no ideal states. Each position brings challenges and opportunities.
There’s no link between scores and aptitude. Experience and training can make us skillful outside of our neuropreferences.
The Cognitive Preference Survey is predictive of neither intelligence nor aptitude for a certain job or role.
You can use the information first to engage your own metacognition, which is our human ability to monitor and understand our own brains at work, and then to gain insight into others reflexive responses to information.
In its simplest form, when we are associative preferent, we tend to activate first for context and experience. In other words, we start talking about what’s coming to our attention and how this thing that has our attention fits with other things that strike us as related. We’ll offer lots of experiential anecdotes, and we’ll express a concern for what’s fresh. Often we’ll start with what’s most salient or urgent and build experientially from there. We’ll ask: What do we know? What are we going to do?
When we’re sequential preferent, we tend to activate first for evidence and process. We start talking about how we’ll know if we’re on the right track and we’ll start lining up the action steps. We’ll look for, or create, heuristics as initial paths through complexity and then let those rules develop in complexity as our understanding expands. Even in a completely unknown situation, we’ll develop a hypothesis against which to test experience. We’ll hear the development of if-then decision trees. The questions tend to begin with how: How do we know this? How are we going to do this?
With listener, mover observer, reader, and talker, you’re looking for behaviors in each category as described below.
Listener
With high listeners, you’re monitoring auditory distractibility.
Low listeners will signal auditory fatigue by tuning out, changing the subject, or interrupting.
Mover
You’re monitoring for the increasing frequency of voluntary and involuntary movement as one manifests from low to high on the mover scale.
Observer
High observers will activate first for representational data. For example: they’ll notice the logo on your coffee mug and be interested in personal information i.e.; was it a gift, a donation premium, souvenir.
Low observers will activate first for essential data. They’ll notice the size or other utilitarian features of your coffee mug and be interested in how to source such a useful mug.
Reader
High readers get the equivalent of a runner’s high from processing text.
Those with low reader activation typically get pleasure from the content of the text and not from the process.
Talker
It’s not how much people talk: it’s do they get energy from processing out loud. Does their energy build midway (high talker) or consistently descend as energy is spent (low talker)?
All
Learn to cycle through each of the processors: Associative, Sequential, Listener, Mover, Observer, Reader, Talker
1. Become aware of the start of the attention period
2. Become aware of the attention having drifted
3. Noted the time durations of the attention periods
4. Note the time of the recovery period for the return of your attention
The interactions can make it tricky. I might have a reasonable attention window for auditory information, but if I’m associative and it’s delivered sequentially, I’ll lose sequential attention before I lose auditory attention. Or I could have long auditory and sequential attention, but my high talker causes me to need to reverbaliz