The Purdue Pegboard Test is a psychomotor test of
manual dexterity and bimanual coordination.
The test involves two different abilities: gross movements of arms, hands, and fingers, and fine motor extremity, also called "fingerprint" dexterity.
Poor Pegboard performance is a sign of deficits in complex, visually guided, or coordinated movements that are likely mediated by circuits involving the
basal ganglia
The basal ganglia (BG) or basal nuclei are a group of subcortical Nucleus (neuroanatomy), nuclei found in the brains of vertebrates. In humans and other primates, differences exist, primarily in the division of the globus pallidus into externa ...
.
History
Joseph Tiffin, an Industrial Psychologist at
Purdue University
Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...
, designed the test in 1948. It was originally intended for assessing the dexterity of assembly line workers.
Method and interpretation
The pegboard consists of a board with two parallel rows with 25 holes into which cylindrical metal pegs are placed by the examinee. The test involves a total of four trials.
To begin, there is a brief practice. The subsets for preferred, non-preferred, and both hands require the patient to place the pins in the holes as quickly as possible, with the score being the number of pins placed in 30 seconds.
Neurocognitive disorders
The Purdue Pegboard test predicted worse adult
tic severity and correlated with tic severity at the time of childhood assessment.
Purdue Pegboard performance deficiencies have been linked to poor social functioning in
schizophrenia
Schizophrenia () is a mental disorder characterized variously by hallucinations (typically, Auditory hallucination#Schizophrenia, hearing voices), delusions, thought disorder, disorganized thinking and behavior, and Reduced affect display, f ...
.
Industry
Results from a correlation analysis suggested that a person's capability on the Purdue Pegboard Test is a good predictor of their ability to use a mobile phone in cold weather.
Reliability
One-trial administration of the Purdue Pegboard Test produced test-retest reliability of 0.60 to 0.79. The three-trial administration test-retest reliability ranged from 0.82 to 0.91.
References
{{Neuropsychology tests
Neuropsychological tests
Cognitive tests