Wisconsin card sorting test

[David McFarlane]

Well, I toyed with the idea of making a simple WCST in E-Prime just 
to amuse myself.  But when I looked into it further, I got puzzled.

The WCST started off with simple printed materials administered 
manually by a human examiner.  Clearly the WCST does not require 
millisecond precision.  So if we simply want to automate it, why use 
such an expensive, specialized, and heavyweight platform as 
E-Prime?  Wouldn't it make more sense to use some more common 
platform such as JavaScript, or Flash, or Python, or even straight 
Visual Basic?  Note that the WCST was automated using simple Turbo 
Basic (for DOS?) as far back as 1996.  Isn't this another case of, 
"When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"  Or, 
insofar as I have not kept up with the literature on the WCST, am I 
just missing something that is obvious to the rest of you?

Also, apparently scoring the test is quite complex (perseverative 
errors, nonperseverative errors, etc.), so building that into the 
program (as opposed to leaving that to later data analysis) would 
take some care.

Finally, did anyone else know that the term "Wisconsin Card Sorting 
Test" was trademarked by Wells Printing and Digital Services of 
Madison, Wisconsin, USA (see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_card_sort )?  So we cannot 
give the name "Wisconsin Card Sorting Test" to any printed materials 
that we produce, but since the trademark does not cover computerized 
versions we may continue to use the name "Wisconsin Card Sorting 
Test" for our computerized versions.

With all that said, note that someone did make an automated WCST demo 
for Inquisit's Millisecond 
(http://www.millisecond.com/download/samples/v3/CardSort ), though I 
do not know what data it stores or how it handles the test scoring.

-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder


At 8/20/2010 12:10 PM Friday, David McFarlane wrote:
>As far as I can tell no one has made an E-Prime WCST available on 
>the Web.  It would be quite interesting to make one.  As I recall, 
>in essence the task involves operantly rewarding the subject for 
>correctly following an undisclosed rule, changing the rule whenever 
>the subject achieves an overall success criterion, and seeing how 
>well the subject can adapt to the changing rules.  This would 
>require some interesting code in E-Prime, in particular scoring the 
>success rate and then changing the "correct" rule on the fly, but it 
>could be done.  Wish I had the liberty to do it myself.
>
>-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder

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