If You're Using a Test for Brain Dysfunction that has These Characteristics, Don't Bother Learning the PICA!
  1. I already am using a test that quantifies all aspects of the patient test responses, including accuracy, responsiveness, completeness, promptness, and motoric efficiency.
  2. My test uses a multidimensional scoring system that I can use with other tests and in treatment.
  3. The test I'm using has psychometrically powerful characteristics including extremely high test-retest reliability, inter-scorer agreement, and internal consistency.
  4. Because of these psychometric strengths, I can let other clinician trained in its use test my patients and be confident the same results would have been achieved if I had done the test.
  5. My test has a computer program that gives me a four page report on my patients, and automatically does multiple regression analyses to help localize lesion sites as well as telling me when the patient is displaying psychological symptoms of malingering, conversion reactions, etc.
  6. It has norms for left hemisphere, right hemisphere, and bilateral hemisphere brain damaged patients.  It also provides normative test data based on age and education that allows you to estimate what the patient's premorbid communicative level was.
  7. It takes about an hour to administer.
  8. If I have medical-legal i8ssues arise about my patient, my test's psychometric characteristics can withstand close scrutiny by the court.
  9. My test uncovers processing patterns like tuning in, tuning out, and stimuli related behavior that are important in treatment planning.
  10. The test gives me a scoring system that enables me to select the appropriate tasks and stimuli for treating the patient.
  11. It gives me a percentile prognosis for how much improvement I can expect in my patient and when I should discontinue treatment.
  12. It gives me a very sensitive and accurate description of my patient so I can report to my colleagues and the patient's family the patient's exact status and what estimate of the future communicative ability will be, all in the form of a printed report.
​If your test doesn't doe all of this, but you'd like a test battery that does all of these things, you should be using the PICA.