David A. Grant

Introduction

David A. Grant (May 17, 1916 – December 28, 1977) was an American experimental psychologist who spent his entire career at the University of Wisconsin. In 1948 he and his graduate student Esta A. Berg published two papers describing a card-sorting procedure that measures how well a person can abandon a rule that no longer works. That procedure became the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, and by the end of the century it was among the most frequently administered instruments in clinical neuropsychology, used to probe frontal lobe damage, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, and attention-deficit disorder. Grant did not live to see it happen: he died in 1977, before the standardized clinical version that made the test ubiquitous had appeared. He is remembered almost entirely for one instrument, and the instrument is remembered far better than its authors — Berg, who wrote the first of the two papers under her own name, has largely disappeared from the citation.

Early Life and Education

Grant was born on May 17, 1916. He took his B.A. at the University of Iowa in 1938, an M.A. at the University of Wisconsin in 1939, and a Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1941. The sequence put him at two of the departments that defined American experimental psychology in the interwar years, and the Wisconsin master's year appears to have decided where he would stay. In 1941 he joined the Wisconsin department as an assistant professor.

The department's quarters in 1941 were the basement of Bascom Hall, and Grant shared an office with Harry Harlow, another recent Stanford Ph.D. Harlow spent his days at the converted cheese factory that served as his primate laboratory, so Grant had the office to himself. His own obituary in American Psychologist notes that the two men were the beginning of a period in which a modest department grew into one of the largest and most respected in the country.

Academic and Professional Career

Grant spent thirty-six years at Wisconsin. He rose through the ranks to full professor and then research professor, chaired the department twice — from 1950 to 1954 and again from 1971 to 1972 — and held the title of Clark L. Hull Research Professor. The chairmanship during 1950–1954 covered the years when the department moved out of Bascom Hall into a building of its own, a transition he oversaw.

His research belonged to the tradition associated with Clark L. Hull: the careful, quantitative analysis of how reinforcement shapes behavior, extended in Grant's case to human concept formation and to what was then called thinking. He studied how easily people shift from one sorting principle to another, how the degree of reinforcement affects that shift, and how verbal and conceptual behavior is acquired. Most of this work appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology and is now read mainly by historians of the field.

What survived was the card-sorting task. Grant and Berg were not trying to build a clinical instrument. They were studying, in normal adults, a phenomenon that clinicians had been describing qualitatively for two decades: some patients, and notably some with brain injuries, become stuck. Egon Weigl had used a rule-shifting sorting task in 1927, and Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb had written in the 1920s about brain-injured patients who lost the capacity for what Goldstein called the abstract attitude and could respond only to the concrete properties of a stimulus. Grant and Berg's contribution was to make that observation into an objective, repeatable procedure with a countable score.

He remained a member of the department until his death in Madison on December 28, 1977. The obituary remembered him as "good and demanding" and noted the unusually large number of students whose first efforts in experimental psychology he had guided.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test

The procedure is simple enough to describe in a paragraph. A participant is shown four stimulus cards — one red triangle, two green stars, three yellow crosses, four blue circles — and a deck of 128 response cards that vary on the same three dimensions. The task is to place each response card beneath whichever stimulus card seems right. No rule is stated. The examiner says only "right" or "wrong." Once the participant has sorted ten consecutive cards correctly, the rule changes without warning, from color to form, from form to number, and back again. The subject must notice, from nothing but the feedback, that something has changed.

The central score is the number of perseverative errors: trials on which the person continues to sort by a rule that has stopped working. High perseveration means the person cannot let go of a mental set. Grant and Berg's innovation was to make this measurable — to turn an impression about rigidity into a number — and additionally to manipulate the degree of reinforcement, showing that the strength of an established habit predicts how hard it is to break.

From Laboratory Technique to Clinical Instrument

The test's transformation was carried out by others. Robert K. Heaton and colleagues produced a standardized 128-card version with a manual and age-stratified norms in 1981, revised and expanded in 1993 with Gordon Chelune, Jack Talley, Gary Kay, and Glenn Curtiss. That manual made the test administrable and interpretable outside research laboratories, and it is the version most clinicians mean when they say "the WCST." By the 1990s the test was a standard component of neuropsychological batteries, particularly for suspected frontal lobe dysfunction, and it had acquired a reputation — deserved or not — as the test of executive function.

The Credit Question

The test takes its name from the university, not from either author. Within psychology it is usually described as "Grant and Berg," yet the practical procedure was published first by Berg alone, in the Journal of General Psychology in 1948, under the title "A simple objective technique for measuring flexibility in thinking." Grant, as her adviser, was senior partner in the collaboration. The asymmetry is worth noting because it is a small, clean instance of a general pattern: instruments outlive their inventors, and the person who writes the method paper is often not the person remembered for it.

Major Publications

Berg, E. A. (1948). A simple objective technique for measuring flexibility in thinking. Journal of General Psychology, 39(1), 15–22.
Grant, D. A., & Berg, E. A. (1948). A behavioral analysis of degree of reinforcement and ease of shifting to new responses in a Weigl-type card-sorting problem. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38(4), 404–411.
Grant, D. A., & Berg, E. A. (1948). Wisconsin Card Sorting Test [Database record]. APA PsycTests.

The first two papers are the entire published origin of the instrument. Grant's other decades of work on concept formation and verbal learning — several dozen articles, mostly in the Journal of Experimental Psychology — were influential inside experimental psychology at the time and are now largely of historical interest.

Impact and Legacy

For half a century the WCST was the single most recognizable test of set-shifting, and it remains in wide clinical use. Grant's contribution was methodological rather than theoretical: he and Berg took a qualitative clinical observation and gave it a scoring procedure, which is what allowed it to accumulate the enormous literature it now has. Almost everyone who has been assessed for executive dysfunction in the last forty years has sorted those cards.

The criticisms are substantial and have come mostly from the clinical side, where the test's reputation grew fastest. The most important is that the WCST does not do what it is often said to do. A critical review by Francisco Barceló and A. Santomé-Calleja, and a subsequent 2009 update with Erika Nyhus, concluded that in its traditional form the test cannot reliably discriminate between frontal and non-frontal lesions: patients with damage elsewhere perform as badly. Functional neuroimaging shows rapid, widespread activation across frontal and non-frontal regions during performance, which means the notion of an anatomically "pure" test of prefrontal function is not merely unattainable but theoretically wrong. Stuss and colleagues made the same point in 2000, describing the WCST as a multifactorial probe of distributed neural networks rather than a frontal lobe test.

A second problem is that the score is not as clean as it looks. Barceló and Robert Knight showed in 2002 that deficits labeled "perseverative" in prefrontal patients are actually a mixture of genuine perseveration and apparently random errors, so the headline score conflates at least two different failures. A third is measurement: practice effects are large, and repeat administrations within weeks produce substantial improvement that reflects learned strategy rather than recovered function, which limits the test's usefulness for tracking patients over time. Add to this the ecological validity worry — real-world executive function involves multi-step planning in contexts the test does not capture — and the well-documented problems of using norms drawn largely from Western, educated populations to evaluate everyone else.

The verdict of the reviewers is not that the test should be abandoned but that it should be demoted. Used as one component of a battery, alongside measures of reasoning and other executive tasks, it remains informative; used alone as an index of frontal integrity, it misleads. That is a fair summary of Grant's own creation: a genuinely clever measurement device, later asked to carry more weight than its designer ever claimed for it.

Learn More

Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, the procedure itself and how it is scored
Harry Harlow, Grant's office-mate in the Bascom Hall basement, who built his own career on a comparable trick
Clark L. Hull, whose research professorship Grant held and whose tradition shaped his work
Neuroscience, the field that later tested whether the WCST really measures what clinicians claimed
History of Psychology, for the mid-century experimentalism Grant belonged to

References

Grant, D. A., & Berg, E. A. (1948). A behavioral analysis of degree of reinforcement and ease of shifting to new responses in a Weigl-type card-sorting problem. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38(4), 404-411.