Failure to Inhibit the Reading Response on the Stroop Test: A Pathognomonic Indicator of Suspect Effort

We present 6 patients who displayed noncredible effort on neuropsychological testing (verified by failures on specialized measures designed to discreetly assess effort status and multiple behavioral inconsistencies) and complained of complete illiteracy secondary to impoverished educational history,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology 2004-04, Vol.26 (2), p.180-189
Main Authors: Lu, Po H., Boone, Kyle Brauer, Jimenez, Nora, Razani, Jill
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Attention - physiology
Biological and medical sciences
Color Perception - physiology
Decision Making
Discrimination Learning - physiology
Humans
Inhibition (Psychology)
Male
Medical sciences
Middle Aged
Neuropsychological Tests - statistics & numerical data
Organic mental disorders. Neuropsychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Reaction Time - physiology
Reading
Retrospective Studies
Verbal Behavior
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Summary:We present 6 patients who displayed noncredible effort on neuropsychological testing (verified by failures on specialized measures designed to discreetly assess effort status and multiple behavioral inconsistencies) and complained of complete illiteracy secondary to impoverished educational history, learning disability, or acquired brain injury. The Stroop Test, a measure of a specific aspect of executive function requiring inhibition of an automatized oral reading response in favor of a less habitual, competing color-naming response, was administered to these patients. All six subjects claimed that they were unable to perform the Word-Reading trial as a consequence of total reading disability, but on the Color-Word Interference trial, they all committed "errors" by reading the written words. Five of the six subjects also performed substantially slower on the Interference condition relative to the Color-Naming trial, indicating that they were in fact inhibiting a reading response. However, in cases involving complaints of complete reading illiteracy, the observation of these individuals performing an act that they claimed to be unable to do was the most powerful and pathognomonic indicator of deliberate feigning or exaggeration of impairment in these cases.
ISSN:1380-3395
1744-411X
DOI:10.1076/jcen.26.2.180.28082