Jessica Hurtubise

University of Windsor · Department of Psychology

The article reviews systemic and context-specific challenges of psychoeducational assessment using two case studies: a 19-year-old woman with feigned attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder and a 50-year-old man with genuine dyslexia. These cases demonstrate that providing a thorough evaluation of performance validity is an essential component of...

The trial-unique, delayed nonmatching-to-location (TUNL) task is a recently developed behavioral task that measures spatial working memory and a form of pattern separation in touchscreen-equipped operant conditioning chambers. Limited information exists regarding the neurotransmitters and neural substrates involved in the task. The present experime...

Atherosclerosis is the narrowing of arteries due to the accumulation of macrophages overloaded with lipids resulting in foam cell formation, and these events occur preferentially at the branching points of arteries which are particularly susceptible to hyperlipidemic stress-induced inflammation and oxidative stress. The different stages of atheroge...

RationaleThe cognitive symptoms observed in schizophrenia are not consistently alleviated by conventional antipsychotics. Following a recent pilot study, sodium nitroprusside (SNP) has been identified as a promising adjunct treatment to reduce the working memory impairments experienced by schizophrenia patients. Objective The present experiments we...

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to switch between different rules or concepts and behavioral flexibility is the overt physical manifestation of these shifts. Behavioral flexibility is essential for adaptive responses and commonly measured by reversal learning and set-shifting performance in rodents. Both tasks have demonstrated vulnerability t...

This study sought to provide a direct comparison between old and new versions of the Trail Making Test (TMT). Eighty-five undergraduate student volunteers were administered the old and new TMT. A third of them were instructed to feign neuropsychiatric deficits. The classification accuracy of the TMTs was evaluated against experimentally induced and...

Objective This study was designed to replicate previous research on embedded validity indicators (EVIs) in the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test – Revised (HVLT-R) and introduce a new forced choice recognition trial (FCR). Method Undergraduate research volunteers were randomly assigned (M Age = 21.7; M Education = 14.5 years, 85% female) to either the...

Objective: This study was designed to examine the classification accuracy of verbal fluency (VF) measures as performance validity tests (PVT). Method: Student volunteers were assigned to the control (n = 57) or experimental malingering (n = 24) condition. An archival sample of 77 patients with TBI served as a clinical comparison. Results: Among stu...

This observational study examined the acute cognitive effects of cannabis. We hypothesized that cognitive performance would be negatively affected by acute cannabis intoxication. Twenty-two medical cannabis patients from Southwestern Ontario completed the study. The majority (n = 13) were male. Mean age was 36.0 years, and mean level of education w...

Influenza during pregnancy is associated with the development of psychopathology in the offspring. We sought to determine whether maternal cytokines produced following administration of viral mimetic polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid (polyI:C) to pregnant rats were predictive of behavioral abnormalities in the adult offspring. Timed-pregnant Sprague...

This study was designed to examine the potential of the Delis-Kaplan Executive System (D-KEFS) version of the Trail Making Test (TMT) as a performance validity test (PVT). Data were collected from a mixed clinical sample of 157 consecutively referred outpatients (49% male, MAge = 47.1, MEducation = 13.6) undergoing neuropsychological assessment at...

This study was designed to evaluate the potential of the Boston Naming Test (BNT) as a performance validity test (PVT). The classification accuracy of the BNT was examined against several criterion PVTs in a mixed clinical sample of 214 adult outpatients physician referred for neuropsychological assessment. Mean age was 46.7 (SD = 12.5); mean educa...

Cutoffs on performance validity tests (PVT) may have to be adjusted based on demographic factors to minimize bias. Although research in this area is minimal, previous work found a gender effect on the Recognition Memory Test (RMT; Kim et al., 2010). The current study aimed to replicate these gender differences on the WCT, as well as examine the eff...