Information representation in decision making: The impact of cognitive style and depletion effects

Although the literature on information representation in decision support has argued for a long time that the way in which information is presented to decision makers should fit both task characteristics and the cognitive style of decision makers, the latter aspect has received much less attention in empirical research. Most studies that took into account cognitive style used rather general instruments to measure it, which do not focus on the specifics of managerial decision making. In this paper, we describe an experiment that uses an instrument specifically developed for a managerial context to study the relationship between cognitive style and decision performance when using tabular or graphical representations. We also take into account that having to deal with a misfitting information representation depletes cognitive resources, and thus might not only impede the solution of the current problem, but also impact subsequent problems. Our results confirm that a mismatch between information representation and cognitive style indeed has effects that last beyond the solution of the current decision problem.