From the author: published on the website At some point in the development of theories of intelligence in general psychology, researchers were faced with the unpredictability of general psychological patterns in differential intellectual behavior. And the higher the level of mental development of the subject, the more the impression of artifactuality of general patterns in relation to the characteristics of individuality was created. In the 50s of the last century, the subject of study was the phenomenological area of ​​individual differences in information processing methods, which were called cognitive styles. Differences in methods of perception, methods of analysis, creation of cognitive structures and assessment of the environment form typical patterns of intellectual behavior, according to which groups of people are similar to each other and at the same time differ from groups of other people. Thus, cognitive styles are formed under the influence of the general rules of the structure of the cognitive, cognitive sphere of a person. Also, the presence of certain cognitive styles in a person confirms the presence in his experience of individual, specific ways of regulating a person’s intellectual activity. So also A.N. Leontyev said that human thinking is characterized by partiality, the conditioning of a person’s thinking activity by his subjective experience (motives, needs, goals, emotions, values, etc.). The word style can be found in encyclopedic dictionaries, where two sides of its meaning are revealed: - Style is an individual, specific way (method, techniques) of behavior, i.e. characteristic of the activity process; - style - a set of distinctive features of a particular author, i.e. characteristics of the product of activity. In the 50-60s, thanks to the works of Gardner, Vitkin, Klein, Kagan, Altman, as well as the works of domestic scientists Grigorenko, Sternberg, Solovyov, Sokolova, individual characteristics of perception, analytical processing, structure formation and categorization of information flow, designated by the term cognitive styles. What is currently understood by cognitive styles: these are individual techniques, methods of processing information coming from the environment in the form of individually unique differences in analysis, perception, structuring, categorization, and assessment of ongoing events. Further, individual differences form special forms of cognitive response that distinguish groups of people from each other or make them similar. That is, the concept of cognitive style is used in two meanings, to note individual differences in information processing and different types of people in the organization of their cognitive sphere. Cognitive styles were first identified to have a number of features that were separated from individual differences in performance on psychometric intelligence (IQ) tests; cognitive styles were viewed as aspects of personality organization rather than just the intellectual sphere of a person; cognitive styles were presented as a form of higher-order intellectual activity, since their main function was not so much information about external influences, but rather the coordination and regulation of basic cognitive processes; cognitive styles were defined as mediators between reality and the subject, having a great influence on the characteristics of individual adaptation processes. On the other hand, cognitive meaning was considered earlier: as a structural characteristic of the cognitive sphere, which can speak about the details of its organization and is not directly related to the features of its content; as individual ways of achieving any cognitive product, an instrumental characteristic of cognitive activity, in contrast to a productive characteristic; cognitive style is described in terms of the bipolar dimension (and recently they are talking about the quadrupole dimension), different from the traditional unipolar.