Conducting research with non-clinical healthy undergraduates: does effort play a role in neuropsychological test performance?

Poor effort by examinees during neuropsychological testing has a profound effect on test performance. Although neuropsychological experiments often utilize healthy undergraduate students, the test-taking effort of this population has not been investigated previously. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether undergraduate students exercise variable effort in neuropsychological testing. During two testing sessions, participants (N = 36) were administered three Symptom Validity Tests (SVTs), the Test of Memory Malingering, the Dot Counting Test, and the Victoria Symptom Validity Test (VSVT), along with various neuropsychological tests. Analyses revealed 55.6% of participants in Session 1 and 30.8% of participants in Session 2 exerted poor effort on at least one SVT. Poor effort on the SVTs was significantly correlated with poor performance on various neuropsychological tests and there was support for the temporal stability of effort. These preliminary results suggest that the base rate of suboptimal effort in a healthy undergraduate population is quite high. Accordingly, effort may serve as a source of variance in neuropsychological research when using undergraduate students.