How'd they do it? Malingering strategies on symptom validity tests.

ABSTRACT

Twenty-five undergraduate students were instructed to feign believable impairment following a brain injury from a car accident and 27 students were told to perform like they had recovered from such an injury. Three forced-choice tests, the Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM), Victoria Symptom Validity Test (VSVT), and Word Memory Test (WMT) were given. Test-taking strategies were evaluated by means of a questionnaire given at the end of the test session. The results revealed that all the tasks differentiated between groups. Using conventional cut-scores, the WMT proved most efficient while the VSVT captured the most participants in the definitive below-chance category. Individuals instructed to feign injury were more likely to prepare prior to the experiment, with feigning of memory loss as the most frequently reported strategy. Regardless, preparation effort did not translate into believable performance on the tests.