College Women with Differential Linguistic-Quantitative Ability Patterns: Performance on two Visual Serial-Search Tasks

Two groups of 14 college women, equated on College Entrance Examination Board Scholastic Aptitude Test scores but showing a discrepancy of at least 150 points between the scores on the Verbal and Mathematical Aptitude Test, were compared on two visual serial-search tasks; a 2 × 2 mixed factorial design was used. There was a trend in the direction of more rapid visual serial-search by the low linguistic-high quantitative subjects than for the high linguistic-low quantitative subjects. Consonant with earlier findings, visual serial-search time was significantly faster for number targets than for letter targets. Between ability patterns and target characteristics there was no significant interaction. The need to include more complex visual serial-tracking tasks in any reexamination of the observed results was noted.