Testing a dual-process-inspired questionnaire-primary residual framework for personality prediction: an exploratory study with static line drawings
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Comprehensive self-report personality inventories can impose substantial response burden, motivating the development of more efficient assessment strategies and the exploration of complementary information sources. Guided by Dual-Process Theory, this exploratory study examined a questionnaire-primary residual fusion framework in which a reduced questionnaire response vector served as the main predictive source, while static abstract line drawings were evaluated as a bounded auxiliary source of information. A total of 100 participants completed the 187-item Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) and provided unprompted abstract line drawings. To account for the small sample size and reduce optimistic bias, we used participant-level repeated cross-validation, fold-local questionnaire item selection, standardized image preprocessing, cross-fitted residual learning, and nested selection of the visual correction scale. The reduced questionnaire provided a useful but imperfect held-out approximation of the full-form 16PF reference scores, with factor-level Pearson correlations ranging from 0.34 to 0.78. In contrast, the static drawing modality did not provide stable incremental predictive value. Nested validation selected a zero visual correction in 21 of 25 outer folds, and the fixed scale originally proposed for visual correction (0.05) produced a slightly higher mean absolute error than the questionnaire-only condition (1.2120 vs. 1.2100). An exploratory analysis using teacher-provided observer ratings likewise showed no advantage for visual fusion over questionnaire-only prediction. These findings indicate that Dual-Process Theory can motivate a testable asymmetric framework for integrating explicit and non-verbal information, but the present data do not support static final line drawings as a reliable source of incremental personality information. Future research should examine richer process-level drawing signals, including stroke timing, pauses, pressure, and trajectory dynamics, in larger independent samples.
Source: Frontiers in Psychology
Authors: Lifen Weng, Yiyang Shi
Institution: Xiamen University of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Applied Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,801
Awards: G4119777295, G6664623623, G7796767605
OpenAlex ID: W7212947785