TEST BATTERY OR ASSESSMENT OF ALCOHOL INDUCED IMPAIRMENT

Many businesses and governmental agencies seek to deter alcohol impairment on the job and, in this connection, feel a need to detect impaired performance due to alcohol or other toxic substances directly, rather than by inference from blood and urine assays. The proposed effort addresses this need. Industry requirements for a performance test of alcohol- induced impairment are that the test be job relevant, brief and simple to administer, and not subject ot practice effects, at least none that are not taken into account. In addition, such a test must have very high specificity and sufficient sensitivity to detect many impaired workers much of the time. In earlier work a battery of nine cognitive tests have been shown to have high specificity, almost 1.00, and sensitivities ranging from less than .45 to more than .90 for BACs from .02 to more than .10. This battery has the weakness, however, that all of the tests in it show significant practice effects. It also takes 15 minutes to administer. In other work, performance on a battery of tests of visual processing speed has been shown to degrade sharply with BAC. The tests in this second battery, however, do not show practice effects after the second administration. The main objective in Phase I will be to determine if this second, temporal-factors battery has a specificity and sensitivities comparable to those already obtained with the cognitive-test battery. If so, the battery would be a superior instrument for detecting alcohol-impaired performance. If this effort is successful, Phase II will include: a similar study with a much larger number of subjects, cross validation of the predicting instrument, programming and implementation of the tests on a special purpose remote test station (SPRTS), empirical demonstration of the comparability of the tests in the new SPRTS, testing schedules designed to maximize deterrence, and analyses of issues such as security, confidentiality, and deception.