The effect of perceptual organization on numerical and preference-based decisions shows inter-subject correlation

Individual differences in cognitive processing have been the subject of intensive research. One important type of such individual differences is the tendency for global versus local processing, which was shown to correlate with a wide range of processing differences in fields such as decision making, social judgments and creativity. Yet, whether these global/local processing tendencies are correlated within a subject across different domains is still an open question. To address this question, we develop and test a novel method to quantify global/local processing tendencies, in which we directly set in opposition the local and global information instead of instructing subjects to specifically attend to one processing level. We apply our novel method to two different domains: (1) a numerical cognition task, and (2) a preference task. Using computational modeling, we accounted for classical effects in choice and numerical-cognition. Global/local tendencies in both tasks were quantified using a salience parameter. Critically, the salience parameters extracted from the numerical cognition and preference tasks were highly correlated, providing support for robust perceptual organization tendencies within an individual. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13423-022-02234-6.