I spent the day in dull office being 'tested.' The idea is to generate a baseline of information in order to offer an opinion as to the effects of my auto accident on my cognitive functioning.

There were a lot of tests. Most were administered and continuously monitored by my personal tester, Eric Adcot. He was just up from the Colorado Springs office, so there was a certain lack of familiarity with the layout of the materials in the Denver office, but the disorder was more entertaining than annoying, and the time spent in confusion offered more opportunity to learn more about the testing process.

I felt subversive, without actually doing anything to subvert the process. Well, that is not entirely true: an active interest in the process of testing, rather than maintaining complete focus on the testing task at hand, probably has an effect on the results. An effect, yes, but I doubt that the results will be biased materially from the unaware test taker.

I am curious if there is such a think as an 'unaware' test taker-especially as the cognitive abilities of the tested subject increase. Are there any 'unaware' test subjects who are otherwise bright and curious individuals? I don't think so.

If I were designing the tests, I would want to get feedback from the test administrator as to the curiousity of the subject towards the tests. Curiousity is not the only indicator of mental ability, but to ignore curiousity is to ignore something important.

One test was designed to measure the ability to organize, and perceive, traditional cause and effect relationships visually. A series of cards were laid on the table, in a seemingly random order, and the subject (that is 'me') was instructed to put them into order. I think that the word 'logical' or 'proper' order was stated, or at least implied. This was a test that had a right and wrong answer.

The final iteration of this test included cards with the following pictures:

1. A man in robes that appeared royal, say a king, is on a dock fishing. There is an empty bucket next to him.
2. The man is holding a bent fishing pole, it appears that a fish is on the line.
3. The man is holding a small fish.
4. The man is again on the dock fishing. The bucket contains a small fish.
5. The man is holding a bent fishing pole, it appears that a fish is on the line.
6. The man is holding a medium sized fish.
7. The man is again on the dock fishing. The bucket contains both a small and medium sized fish.
8. The man is holding a bent fishing pole, it appears that a fish is on the line.
9. The man is holding a large fish, and appears to be shouting at the water.
10. The man is walking away from the water, carrying fishing pole and bucket. A scuba diver is on the surface, holding yet another fish and watching the man walk away.

In any event, the pictures were not offered in that order. They were scrambled, and the task was to create a cohesive narrative. I offered forth the narrative as described above. The king is fishing, with success, and catches a succession of larger and larger fish. Finally he either tires of the sport, or perhaps has run out of fishing time, and so tells his employee/subject that he is done. We then learn that there was a diver catching the fish underwater and attaching fish to his line. A tidy, cohesive, narrative.

I was interested in the way that the story would change if the elements were rearranged. Given the cards, the only change that I felt would be reasonable without violating the implicit iron law of continuity, would be to place the 'yelling' card before catching the large fish. This would become a story of a king dissatisfied with the performance of his subject, and demanding the big fish, and right now, damnit!

The validity of this test would seem to have diminished over time. When the test was devised, the majority of adults had not grown up in a culture that was saturated with visual narratives. The culture today is not the culture of the time of the creation of the test. Today a basic competence in decoding basic visual narratives is assumed by anyone past kindergarten.

An interesting test could be created by showing the subject a series of storyboards and offering the instruction to place the boards into order to tell a 'good story.' This would be an open ended test.

Later in the day I had the dubious honor of experiencing the cultural biases of the test in a more explicit fashion. I was give the 'WAIS' intelligence test. I was asked questions that required me to explain:

1. Why certain drugs are only available with a prescription
2. Why Child Labor laws are necesary
3. Why a free press is important in a democracy

Even my answer to the free press being required as a check on the power of other institutions in society was not accepted without question.

And then we moved on to word pairs. What do North and West have in common? My offering that they were both geographical synonyms for white european culture raised an eyebrow. I explained the rather obvious hemispheric connection to grudging acceptance.

There were also knowledge flip cards. The reading comprehension section displayed a paragraph of 'tricky' words, a rather dense bit of writing. After reading the card flipped to show four caricatures. The task was to pick the one that best described the scene that the paragraph described. I took that test to its' last card. I also maxed the pronunciation test, as well as the math test (the final question asked for the derivative of 2x^3, 3x^2 is the obvious answer). I sadly, but predictably, had more trouble with the spelling test. The test requires you to get five correct in a row, so we went quite a ways backwards before we arrived at the happy, and rather pointless, event.

The spelling test presented four instances of the same word, and required picking the one correct version. The problem with this format, to me, is that seeing the wrong words seemed to mess me up so that I couldn't discern the correct word. I believe that had I been asked to spell the words, without seeing the misspellings, that I would have had more success.

But how do I know what they are _really_ testing?

The most boring, while clearly relavent, test was of auditory perception. A sheet of paper was offered with many multiple choice questions. A tape was then played, and I was charged with underlining the word, for each question, that the man had pronounced. They were almost all nonesense words. So the choice was something like: meef, meev, neef, neev. I quite literally almost fell asleep on that test!