Personality factors and inspection time

Abstract

The measure ‘inspection time’ (IT) has been used in a variety of correlational studies which show that IT and IQ tend to correlate positively (see Brand and Deary, 1982). As Longstreth, Walsh, Alcorn, Szeszulski and Manis (1986, this issue, pp. 643-651) put it, “‘inspection time’, is the latest entry in the sweepstakes contest of predicting intelligence from simple psychophysical or chronometric measurements”. If it is a contest, IT is a late entry compared with more traditional measures like reaction time (RT). In 1895, in the Psychological Review, R. Meade Bathe published the results of an RT study comparing the speed of responding to auditory, visual and tactile stimuli of White Americans, Black Americans and Indian Americans. He did not use any intelligence test, instead he argued that, “in proportion to intellectual advancement there should be, through the law of compensation, a waning in the efficiency of the automatism of the individual”. From this assertion he argued that if White Americans were intellectually superior to Black or Indian Americans this would be reflected in White Americans having longer RTs than the other two groups. This reverses the more usual contention which equates speed with higher intelligence but. as Table 1 shows, he obtained results in line with his contention although the tactile condition does not, in fact, yield a significant F-ratio.