Interesting distinction. I had a colleague once who struck me as very good at following a chain of reasoning -- one of the best I've ever met at that -- but not good at maintaining perspective. This made him an excellent implementor but not so great a designer (in my opinion, anyway).
If you think of reasoning like a linked list, you want to make sure you keep a pointer pointed at the head of the list so you can quickly find your way back out and into the right context.
Interesting, however I believe other formulation of the thinking theory might be also used. If you think of all beliefs that a person has as pieces of the puzzle. Those pieces have to be interconnected in order to create a perception of the object/world. If new knowledge is introduced to the system, one piece of the puzzle is taken away and new piece substitutes it. This kind of thinking is stable and can react fast to changes.
The article made me think of the importance of function currying. When you take one variable at a time you are forced to think about an ordering of the variables and what you do at each step. See Pajer's talk at FlatMap, http://vimeo.com/96639840
If I were to try to understand this in terms of analogies, would [Sequence vs Cluster] be analogous to [DIY vs Outsourced]?