EVALUATION OF THE RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY OF THE REPEATABLE COGNITIVE-PERCEPTUAL-MOTOR BATTERY

To provide further validation for the Repeatable Cognitive-Perceptual-Motor Battery (RCPM) as a measure of attention/psychomotor speed, its sensitivity to a clinically relevant dose of diazepam (10mg) was studied in a randomized, double-blind format. Convergent validity was assessed with tasks sensitive to diazepam, namely, Discriminant Reaction Time (DRAT) and Visual Analogue Sedation Ratings (VASRs). Divergent validity was assessed with untimed verbal and visual-spatial tasks. Forty undergraduates, randomly assigned to either drug or placebo condition, were tested three times in two sessions with the RCPM, the DRAT, and the VASRs, with verbal and visual-spatial measures added for the post-drug (second session) condition. The first two pre-drug testings were 1 week apart and established reliability as well as provided baseline measurements. Repeated measures analysis of variance and discriminant analysis of post-drug scores supported the sensitivity and convergent/dive ent validity of the RCPM.