“The Birth of a Test”: The Sensory Quotient

Abstract

A multi-modal pattern-discrimination test has been used to differentiate sections of a general urban population: occupational groups within an industry, academic groups within a school, and persons attending performing arts. The differentiation is in terms of sensory competence based on performance on four sensory modalities, yielding both individual and group sensory profiles as well as an over-all score, the Sensory Quotient.The Sensory Quotient (SQ) test, at present a multi-modal pattern-discrimination test individually administered, was originally described in this journal ( 3 ) when the ease in improvement of recognition on corrective feedback, was also reported. Since then the test has been applied to a 10% random cross-sectional sample of the employees at the headquarters of an electronic and computer industry, in order to determine whether the SQ could differentiate the occupational groupings within the company, whether such differences were predictable by experts within and outside the company and whether the sensory profile related significantly to other variables such as IQ, sex, education, age, years of ernployment, etc.There were 20 occupational groupings ( N = 268), ranging from toolmaker and wire wrapper to systems engineer and they all showed significantly different ( f l < .001) sensory profiles in terms of their performance on each of the four modalities tested, namely visual, audile, active and passive tactile. These differences were enhanced by using the previously reported 'treatment' method ( 1 ) of corrective feedback. They were also enhanced by grouping the senses into twos, threes, and all four (the SQ itself is an aggregate score). The latter gave the most powerful differentiation, which was enhanced by a factor of 10.The results of this research were detailed elsewhere ( 2 ) but the essence is that there was no interaction between occupational groups and sensory competence, as measured by the test in a range of each of its components (from single modality to total SQ; from initial performance to improvement of recognition). Yet, each of the occupations had a characteristic profile and the most striking differentiation was between blue collar workers who had a low SQ and especially a lower visual component and white collar workers who had a high SQ and an especially high visual component. Prediction by judges inside the company or outside did not work very well except in obvious occupational groups like key punch operators and wire w r a p pets who were more tactile than machine-card operators who were more visual.The reason for failure to predict from a judgment of sensory employment in the 'Professor of Environmental Studies.