Psychobiological Correlates of Aptitude among Navy Recruits.

摘要

The purpose of this research was to explore the possibility of using a measure of psychobiological functioning, the visual evoked potential (VEP), as a means of augmenting the personnel information now derived primarily from paper and pencil tests. Recently developed computer-based methods of recording and analyzing VEPs were used to test 206 Navy recruits, half of whom had been classified as low aptitude (score of 20-40 centiles on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) and half, as high aptitude (score 80-99 centiles). Visual evoked brain potentials were generated by a flashing light stimulus. Computer averaging was used to derive 44 measures of brain wave activity from the eight scalp electrodes. The measures taken were evoked potential amplitude, asymmetry, variance, and latency. Several statistical methods were used to assess the relationship between the VEP variates and the AFQT-based groups. Significant relationships were found between the brain VEP and the AFQT (p < or = 0.01). EP variance and latency were the two best psychobiological predictors of AFQT group membership. A discriminant analysis based on factor analytically derived scores proved to be most effective of the statistical methods tried.