The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST)

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is often known as an ideal neuropsychological test of set-shifting ability. During the WCST a number of incentive cards are shown to the participant or patient, the participant is told to sort the cards in the correct order; without being told the correct order the participant is just told whether or not the order is right or wrong. Before they started using the computer based test the WCST used paper cards and was carried out with the experimenter on one side of the desk facing the participant on the other. The test takes approximately 10 - 20 minutes to carry out and generates a number of psychometric scores, including numbers, percentages, and percentiles of: categories achieved, trials, errors, and

They also aimed dissociate these cognitive processes based on their understanding to the investigational operation of working memory load which is displayed in study one and then they focused on age related changes in study

In one condition the participant had three cards placed in front of them and they had to switch between three card sorting rules just like in the original paper version of the WCST. In another condition they started to increase the amount of information that had to be processed by adding another card to the set which is called a fourth viable task. The first study was conducted with twenty-five undergrad students that didn’t have any history of neurological and psychiatric disabilities they were grouped by the age range of 18 to 33 every participant had normal or corrected to normal vision. They sat about a foot and a half away from the monitor, then the professors placed about 24 stimulus cards on that varied in color, shape, number, and shading (filled, empty, dotted, hatched). The use of so many different cards is necessary for a sensitive scoring of error scores, it allows determining which rule has been chosen by the examinee. “The number of viable task rules was varied as the central manipulation of this study. In the three-rule condition, one of the four rules was inactive for the participant (i.e., the participant was told that there were only three viable task rules and responses to the fourth rule never resulted in positive feedback).” (Lange