A visual retention test for clinical use.

sures retention or immediate memory, which is justifiably considered to be a significant aspect of mental capacity and one which is especially important clinically because of its close relationship to mental impairment. The test has obvious technical advantages, such as brevity of administration, lack of need for test materials and the objective character of the patient's performance. Nevertheless, while it is a useful single test, both clinical experience and experimental observations indicate that it cannot be considered to be in itself an adequate measure of retentive capacity and that to make a global judgment concerning a patient's retentive capacity on the basis of this test alone, as is so often done, is quite unwarranted. Clinical experience shows that a poor performance on the auditory-vocal digit span test is by no means necessarily indi¬ cative of defective retentive capacity. It is well known that emotional tension can significantly impair performance on the test. Indeed, con¬ tinued experience suggests that it is a test which is unusually sensitive to emotional influences. Consequently, a poor performance in a tense patient does not permit unequivocal interpreta¬ tion. The poor performance might be due to emotional disturbance; yet one has no evidence that this is necessarily the case. The whole per¬ formance, therefore, must be discounted as neither indicating nor ruling out impairment in retention. Since the possibility of emotional dis¬ turbance should be considered in all instances of