The Mental Capacity Test Battery

MENTAL CAPACITY TESTING
AND MEASUREMENT OF THE EFFECTS OF STRESS
AND ENVIRONMENT ON MENTAL PERFORMANCE

“It’s a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test”
-- Elbert Hubbard

A thesis by Twin Srikaew, M.S.

Directed by Dr. Kambiz Farahmand, Ph.D., P.E.

The Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering,
Texas A&M University-Kingsville

As we approach the new millennium, the advances in information and communication technology overloads our senses with massive amount of information which must be categorized and presented efficiently for better understanding of the topic or even to generate a response. Efficiency and performance are directly related to mental capacity. Although, many efforts to measure mental capacity adequately are still in progress, there has been numerous previous attempts to evaluate and compare human mental capacity and performance. This study addresses this last and the most daunting frontiers of human mechanism.
This study also introduces a technique to evaluate mental capacity of human subjects under different physiological and environmental conditions. The mental capacity battery has been developed to measure the mental capacity by comparing Response Time (RT), Accuracy (AC) and Repeatability (RP) of a subject, testing under normal as well as stressed conditions. One can, hence, evaluate the stress and the environment that affects human mental capacity.

Mental Capacity

The maximum potential to understand the general logic of real world tasks from direct perception. Mental Capacity is a unique quality of an individual, INDEPENDECE OF AGE.

More detail

Test Specification

Compact and comprehensive: 20 questions : AVG duration = 7 minutes.
No Time Limited: No Time Stress.
Test descriptions are based on real world task defined by Miller.
Test difficulty : 70% correct score under normal condition.
Presenting in a computer game format
Ably to measure Response Time (RT) Accuracy (AC) Repeatability (RP) efficiently
Language independence: Visual display, pictorial question, mathematics, color, and coding are emphasized more than language.
The answering method is based on Noise-detection theory- true/false, yes/no.
Requires use of little muscle force to push the button.
Easy to test.The results can be retrieved immediately after test session.
No special instrumentation : Low Cost