Method
Initially, a number of stimulus cards are presented to the participant. The participant is told to match the cards, but not how to match; however, he or she is told whether a particular match is right or wrong. The original WCST used paper cards and was carried out with the experimenter on one side of the desk facing the participant on the other. Since the early 1990s, however, computerized versions of the task have been available, the most recent version being the Microsoft Windows-compatible version 4.0. The latter has the advantage of automatically scoring the test, which was quite complex in the manual version. The test takes approximately 12–20 minutes to carry out and generates a number of psychometric scores, including numbers, percentages, and percentiles of: categories achieved, trials, errors, and perseverative errors.
Read more about this topic: Wisconsin Card Sorting Test
Famous quotes containing the word method:
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—Harold Rosenberg (19061978)
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—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)