Quantitative measures of memory malingering on the Wechsler Memory Scale--Third edition in mild head injury litigants

Wechsler Memory Scale-Third edition (WMS-III) performance in 25 mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) litigants who met the criteria for probable malingered neurocognitive dysfunction (MND) was compared with 50 nonmalingering subjects. The base rate for probable MND in the population studied was 27%. Overall, malingerers showed globally depressed memory function. They returned significantly poorer scores than nonmalingerers on all WMS-III indexes and subtests, and on selected WMS-III index difference scores and intelligence-memory difference scores. Using the minimum score returned in the nonmalingerers as the cut-off for malingering, the delayed auditory recognition memory tasks were highly effective in detecting malingering. Raw scores below 43 on the auditory recognition-delayed (AR-D) subtest or below 18 on word list II-recognition, identified around 80% of the malingerers. In a group of 50 severe TBI litigants, only a very small proportion (i.e., <10%) returned scores below the cut-offs for malingering for the mild TBI subjects.