develpoment of a cognitive screeining test battery for

the present study was designed to develop a preliminatory cognitive screeting test battery for differentiating brain damaged patients, from psychiatric patients and normal subjects.based on previous researches, the items scales, administraion and scoring instructions for the test battery were prepared. the test included the following scales: attention, memory, construction ability, receptive language, repetition, objects naming, calculation, resorning and concept formation.then, a sample of 80 subjects (20 brain dameged, 20 schizophernics, 20 mood disorder and 20 normal subjects matched for age, sex, education) were selected and were administered the battery. variables such as age, sex, education and handedness were used for matching subjects. the results showed that the cognitive screeining test battery with a cut off point of 116 can differentiate brain damaged patients from other groups (85% sensitivity and 80% specificity) and with a cut off point of 140 can differentiate normal subjects from other groups (85% sensitivity and 85% specificity). it was also observed that the attention and memory scales has higher sensitivity and specificity compared to other scales.discriminant analysis was used to study the test validity (correct classification of subjects).the results showed that the test battery was able to discriminate differnet groups with 87.5% accuracy classification rate. the reliability of the test battery estimated by test-retest method, based on the performatnce of 20 subjects (five subject from each group ) was 0.9*6 and all of the scales had acceptable reliabiltiy coefficients.