Those Neuropsychological Tests which are fascinating
Ever since I started my university life as a psychology student, I have participated in many psychological labs as a subject. However, most of the tests I have done are unbearably boring and prolonged. However, not all of the psychological tests are like that. A few Neuropsychological tests that are designed to test brain function and pathway are very fun to take and show high validity and reliability. So here are some neuropsychological tests I would like to introduce.
Split Brain Tests
The picture above is one of the most classic tests for patients with split brains. The cause of a split brain is usually damage to commissural fibre(corpus callosum and maybe anterior commissure). Response To Visual Stimulus is tested by flashing a word or a picture of an object on only one side of the visual field. After that, the patient will be asked for a verbal response or a non-verbal response by picking up the object on the table based on tactile sensation. The result of the test simply shows that the patient can only name the object he sees with his left hemisphere. The patient is also able to find the matching objects that he sees with his right hemisphere when verbally responding: I see nothing.
Prefrontal Cortical area functioning tests
As is known to a majority of psychology students, damage to prefrontal cortex tends to cause impairment on behavioral flexibility and regulation, monitoring in working memory, active memory retrieval, arbitrary association learning, etc. I would like to introduce the tests for the first two impairments. The first one is Wisconsin Card Sorting Task.
The goal of this test is to sort the deck of cards you are given by one of the categories: shape, colour, the number of cards, etc. The category changes every few minutes without telling you. During the exam, you need to guess which category it is right now, and the experimenter will only give you a yes/no response. Patients with damage to prefrontal cortex exhibit perseverative errors. They persevere and keep doing it impulsively knowing they are doing it wrong.
The second one is The Self-ordered Pointing Task. This task used to test working memory was conducted by Dr. Milner and Dr. Patriedes at McGill University.
In this test, patients are asked to select on item per card until all items have been selected. patients need to keep track (monitoring the selection they made) because the items change location on every card. This test involving the monitoring of information within working memory. Patients with prefrontal lesions tend to make more errors.
Finally, after all these interesting psychological tests shown above, I hope more and more interesting psychological tests can be designed with high validity and reliability. Frankly speaking, I hope researchers would take the participants’ motivation to finish the tests you come up responsibly with into consideration.
