Utility of Latency Scores from Tower of London -- Drexel University 2nd Edition as Embedded Effort Measure

Malingering has been a growing concern within the field of psychological assessment for many years. Individuals who are motivated to feign impairment in order to achieve secondary gain are often difficult to accurately detect. With the increased access to information on the internet about the after effects of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, malingerers may educate themselves of more effective ways to seem impaired before beginning an assessment with a psychologist. Psychologists must continue seeking out new methods of detecting malingering as older methods become available for individuals to research on the Internet. This study examined the performances of individuals on the Tower of London-Drexel University 2nd Edition. For the purposes of this study, 53 subjects were divided among three treatment conditions: Control, Naive, and Coached. A series of one-way ANOVAs were run to compare the performances of each of the groups utilizing various scores on the Tower of London. Results indicated the Coached group performed significantly better than the other groups when considering the Total Correct Score from the Tower of London; however, this finding is likely due to a sampling error. No further significant differences were found, which could indicate the Tower of London is a difficult test for individuals to effectively fake impairment. Limitations of the findings and suggestions for future research are explored.