Does cognitive control affect successful sandbagging of concussion symptoms?

The value of concussion baseline assessments is dependent upon athletes giving their best effort. If an athlete fakes poor performance or “sandbags”, a future injury may go undetected. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine if the SportGait concussion baseline assessment detects differences between participants instructed to sandbag and those who are not. Furthermore, I examined whether participants’ cognitive control is related to their ability to fake poor performance on SportGait. Forty-four participants completed two cognitive control tasks, were randomly assigned to “sandbag” or do their best and completed the SportGait baseline concussion assessment. Results revealed that “sandbagging” participants endorsed more concussion symptoms, made more errors on the CPT-3, and demonstrated lower stride power in their gait. However, cognitive control did not predict sandbagging performance. Together these results indicate that SportGait detects sandbagging, but additional investigation of factors including the impact of coaching on faking behaviors is needed