What About Inhibition in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test?

Abstract

The commercially available Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is one of the most commonly used tests for assessing executive functions within clinical settings. Importantly, however, it remains relatively unclear exactly what processes are assessed by the test. Conceptually, increased perseverative errors in sorting cards are usually related to deficient inhibition processes. Empirically, evidence supporting this conclusion is limited. In a sample of 38 healthy adults we addressed the question to what extent inhibition mechanisms assessed by the go/no-go and the stop-signal paradigm are related to WCST performances. Inhibition-related scores were found to predict non-perseverative errors better than perseverative errors. Consequently we conclude that the non-perseverative errors score reflects processes that are partly dependent on inhibition functions.

Keywords:

• Response inhibition
• WCST
• Go/no-go
• Stop-signal

Notes and Acknowledgments

Complete departmental affiliation: Jean-Paul Steinmetz, Ph.D., Center for Educational Measurement and Applied Cognitive Science, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Claude Houssemand, Ph.D., Center for Educational Measurement and Applied Cognitive Science, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg.

Changes of affiliation: Jean-Paul Steinmetz, Ph.D. is now at ZithaSenior, Department of Research & Development.

The authors are grateful to Dr. Christine Schiltz and Dr. Even Loarer for providing valuable comments and suggestions during the preparation of the manuscript. We thank Lisa Trierweiler and Dr. Salvador Rivas for proofreading the manuscript.

Notes

¹ Note that we discovered two outliers in our sample presenting an FMS score of 4. For the computation of the zero-order Pearson correlations we replaced the two outliers by the sample mean score + 2 SD.