Refining the Definitions of Sensing and Intuition as Measured by the MBTI

inferential cognition. Intuitives, but the differences were far from significant. Once more, the action took place along another type dimension, this time with Thinking types outperforming Feeling types, and, to a lesser extent, Judging types outperforming Perceiving types. These results are consistent with the competitive focus of the Thinking preference and the conscientious desire to do well of the Judging preference. Perhaps the Corsi test, unlike the others, is a simple enough task to allow motivation to have more effect; in more complex or difficult tasks, motivation might be ineffective if not a handicap. Perhaps too, this task draws on the natural analytical predisposition of Thinking types and their tendency to have a linear orientation to time (Myers et al, 1998), qualities which may support attention to block sequences. Results on the hue and pitch discrimination tasks produced no significant differences for any of the preference pair comparisons. Thus, our data showed no evidence of superior hearing or vision for Sensing types. We consider this mild evidence against the idea that the Sensing preference is associated with superior sense modalities. Our tentativeness reflects the fact that we relied on external websites to administer and score the tests, and for our test subjects to accurately relay the results to CAPT. The data did contain some obvious mistakes in data transcription (such as supplying the hearing test results for the vision test); nonobvious mistakes could have easily escaped detection. Another concern is that subjects scoring poorly might be embarrassed by their performance and report a higher score, or refrain from reporting such a score at all. Since typology reflects a psychology of consciousness (and by corollary, what one attends to), we might not find physiological differences in threshold once Ss and Ns are instructed to give attention to the physical phenomenon. Thus, another possible explanation of our findings is that we chose tests that missed the essential functional quality of Sensing. For example, our focus on thresholds of perception tells us little about whether persons with a Sensing preference might remember more details about an environment, or whether they attend more to colors, sounds, and odors in a room than persons who prefer Intuition do. Type preferences may more define what rises into consciousness, is attended to, and remembered, in the midst of everyday life, a possibility we did not test. Future research should expand testing to address these other modes of perceptual acuteness—for example, by placing both Ss and Ns in a stimulus-rich environment and then asking them to recall details later. In any event, there is little evidence that has emerged from this research to support the strong assertions in the literature on psychological type that Sensing types—at least broadly— have superior sense modalities or better visual memories. The state of the evidence strongly underscores the need for additional research to support assertions about Sensing beyond a simple preference for factual, straightforward information over more abstract, inferential cognition. Sensing–Intuition combined. We created two varieties of the Stroop test to explore whether a preference