Relation of Grade-point Averages and Placement Test Scores to Analytic Tendency and to Performance on the Iowa Pursuitmeter

Miles, in two closely related investigations (5, 6), dichotomized male subjects on the basis of their statements as to how they had gone about solving several block design problems of the Kohs type. The two categories were analyzers and non-analyzers. Subjects were classified as analyzers if their a posteriori verbalizations indicated a tendency, at the conceptual level, to break each design down into parts before any blocks were actually moved. They were classified as non-analyzers if their statements failed to suggest that a breaking-into-parts approach had been employed. In the common run of male undergraduate students at the State University, the probability of getting an analyzer in this general way is about 45/100. The dichotomizing was not done for its own sake but for the purpose of identifying, if possible, one (or more) of the primary determiners of the very great differences among male undergraduates in learning to perform the complex perceptual-motor tasks provided by the Iowa Pursuitmeter. As predicted, the analyzers, as a group, were markedly superior to the non-analyzers in performing the standard task, and superior to a lesser degree in performing the reversed task