Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Analytic reasoning differences, as gauged from intelligence metrics, in students engaged in streams requiring a predom-inantly divergent (arts) or convergent thinking (science and engineering) is a topic of interest. In this paper we haveexamined this difference by a modified sequence of two sections (D & E) of the Standard Ravens Progressive matrices(RPM). The scan path gaze behavior was analyzed with an eye tracker. The 30 engineering students (half of them arealso trained in fine arts) scored higher than the 15 fine arts students. In the former cohort, the artistic and the non-artisticset show no difference in performance but the scan path, fixation count and time taken indicate possible differences invisual strategies for pattern identification. From the detailed analysis, we argue that intelligence as measured by RPM isenhanced by training in reasoning and logic as in engineering streams and might not reflect an innate ability.