Failure to Maintain Set

Abstract

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is a general behavioral assessment that contains a myriad of dependent variables, each contributing to the overall assessment of executive function. In this paper, the authors explore the underlying ability that is measured by the variable failure to maintain set (FMS). Two opposing theories, cognitive flexibility and distractibility, are presented to determine what cognitive processes underlie failures to maintain set, and two analyses of archival data are presented. In analysis one, we analyzed data from a study where the WCST predicted creativity in participant constructions of Haiku poetry, but the analysis was not able distinguish whether FMS was predicting cognitively flexibility or distractibility. In analysis two, we analyzed data from a separate study where the WCST was used to predict vigilance in a divided attention task, and we detected that FMS inversely predicted vigilant performance. Our overall analysis suggests that FMS is an assessment of distractibility, not cognitive flexibility. We end with a discussion of the implications of our findings, and directions for future research.