Personality style differences in visual search performance.

The present study continues the examination of the personality styles in normal populations that have been described in the clinical literature. Earlier work has focused on behavioral, attitudinal, and cognitive components of the personality styles. The present study extends our exploration of the cognitive domain by examining the performance of different personality groups on a visual scanning task. Hysterics searched a stimulus array for letter targets at a mean rate of 0.04 +/- SD 0.177 seconds per unit of information, which was slower than the control rate of 0.0225 +/- SD 0.0078 seconds. The results indicated that hysterics used a serial search strategy to compensate for an inability to process information efficiently and thus differed from compulsives who conformed to task demands and performed similarly to controls.