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Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how a person's cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Professionals in this branch of psychology focus on how injuries or illnesses of the brain affect cognitive and behavioral functions.
Neuropsychological tests are specifically designed tasks that are used to measure a psychological function known to be linked to a particular brain structure or pathway. Tests are used for research into brain function and in a clinical setting for the diagnosis of deficits. They usually involve the systematic administration of clearly defined procedures in a formal environment. Neuropsychological tests are typically administered to a single person working with an examiner in a quiet office environment, free from distractions. As such, it can be argued that neuropsychological tests at times offer an estimate of a person's peak level of cognitive performance. Neuropsychological tests are a core component of the process of conducting neuropsychological assessment, along with personal, interpersonal and contextual factors.
Intellectual giftedness is an intellectual ability significantly higher than average. It is a characteristic of children, variously defined, that motivates differences in school programming. It is thought to persist as a trait into adult life, with various consequences studied in longitudinal studies of giftedness over the last century. There is no generally agreed definition of giftedness for either children or adults, but most school placement decisions and most longitudinal studies over the course of individual lives have followed people with IQs in the top 2.5 percent of the population—that is, IQs above 130. Definitions of giftedness also vary across cultures.
Clinical neuropsychology is a sub-field of cognitive science and psychology concerned with the applied science of brain-behaviour relationships. Clinical neuropsychologists use this knowledge in the assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and or rehabilitation of patients across the lifespan with neurological, medical, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, as well as other cognitive and learning disorders. The branch of neuropsychology associated with children and young people is pediatric neuropsychology.
Neuropsychological assessment was traditionally carried out to assess the extent of impairment to a particular skill and to attempt to determine the area of the brain which may have been damaged following brain injury or neurological illness. With the advent of neuroimaging techniques, location of space-occupying lesions can now be more accurately determined through this method, so the focus has now moved on to the assessment of cognition and behaviour, including examining the effects of any brain injury or neuropathological process that a person may have experienced.
In cognitive science and neuropsychology, executive functions are a set of cognitive processes that are necessary for the cognitive control of behavior: selecting and successfully monitoring behaviors that facilitate the attainment of chosen goals. Executive functions include basic cognitive processes such as attentional control, cognitive inhibition, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Higher-order executive functions require the simultaneous use of multiple basic executive functions and include planning and fluid intelligence.
Edith F. Kaplan was an American psychologist. She was a pioneer of neuropsychological tests and did most of her work at the Boston VA Hospital. Kaplan is known for her promotion of clinical neuropsychology as a specialty area in psychology. She examined brain-behavioral relationships in aphasia, apraxia, developmental issues in clinical neuropsychology, as well as normal and abnormal aging. Kaplan helped develop a new method of assessing brain function with neuropsychological assessment, called "The Boston Process Approach."
NEPSY is a series of neuropsychological tests authored by Marit Korkman, Ursula Kirk and Sally Kemp, that is used in various combinations to assess neuropsychological development in children ages 3–16 years in six functional domains.
A continuous performance task, continuous performance test, or CPT, is any of several kinds of neuropsychological test that measures a person's sustained and selective attention. Sustained attention is the ability to maintain a consistent focus on some continuous activity or stimuli, and is associated with impulsivity. Selective attention is the ability to focus on relevant stimuli and ignore competing stimuli. This skill is associated with distractibility.
IQ classification is the practice of categorizing human intelligence, as measured by intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, into categories such as "superior" or "average".
Ammons Quick Test (QT) is an intelligence test that was designed in 1962 by Robert B. Ammons and his wife Carol H. Ammons. This test has been used for many years to help assess premorbid intelligence. It is a passive response picture-vocabulary test.
The California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) is one of the most widely used neuropsychological tests in North America. As an instrument, it represents a relatively new approach to clinical psychology and the cognitive science of memory. It measures episodic verbal learning and memory, and demonstrates sensitivity to a range of clinical conditions. The test does this by attempting to link memory deficits with impaired performance on specific tasks. It assesses encoding, recall and recognition in a single modality of item presentation (auditory-verbal). The CVLT is considered to be a more sensitive measure of episodic memory than other verbal learning tests. It was designed to not only measure how much a subject learned, but also reveal strategies employed and the types of errors made. The CVLT indexes free and cued recall, serial position effects, semantic clustering, intrusions, interference and recognition. Delis et al. (1994) released the California Verbal Learning Test for Children (CVLT-C). The California Verbal Learning Test-II (CVLT-II) is an updated version of the original CVLT, which has been standardized and provides normative data.
The Trail Making Test is a neuropsychological test of visual attention and task switching. It has two parts, in which the subject is instructed to connect a set of 25 dots as quickly as possible while maintaining accuracy. The test can provide information about visual search speed, scanning, speed of processing, mental flexibility, and executive functioning. It is sensitive to cognitive impairment associated with dementia, including Alzheimer's disease.
Pediatric neuropsychology is a sub-speciality within the field of clinical neuropsychology that studies the relationship between brain health and behaviour in children. Many pediatric neuropsychologists are involved in teaching, research, supervision, and training of undergraduate and graduate students in the field.
The National Adult Reading Test (NART) is a widely accepted and commonly used method in clinical settings for estimating premorbid intelligence levels of (initially) English-speaking patients with dementia in neuropsychological research and practice. Such tests are called hold tests as these abilities are thought to be spared, or "held" following neurological injury or decline. The NART was developed by Hazel Nelson in the 1980s in Britain and published in 1982. The test comprises 50 written words in British English which all have irregular spellings, so as to test the participant's vocabulary rather than their ability to apply regular pronunciation rules. The manual includes equations for converting NART scores to predicted IQ scores on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.
Digit symbol substitution test (DSST) is a neuropsychological test sensitive to brain damage, dementia, age and depression. The test is not sensitive to the location of brain-damage. It consists of digit-symbol pairs followed by a list of digits. Under each digit the subject should write down the corresponding symbol as fast as possible. The number of correct symbols within the allowed time is measured.
The Luria–Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery (LNNB) is a standardized test that identifies neuropsychological deficiencies by measuring functioning on fourteen scales. It evaluates learning, experience, and cognitive skills. The test was created by Charles Golden in 1981 and based on previous work by Alexander Luria that emphasizes a qualitative instead of quantitative approach. The original, adult version is for use with ages fifteen and over, while the Luria–Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery for Children (LNNB-C) can be used with ages eight to twelve; both tests take two to three hours to administer. The LNNB has 269 items divided among fourteen scales, which are motor, rhythm, tactile, visual, receptive speech, expressive speech, writing, reading, arithmetic, memory, intellectual processes, pathognomonic, left hemisphere, and right hemisphere. The test is graded on scales that are correlated to regions of the brain to help identify which region may be damaged. The Luria–Nebraska has been found to be reliable and valid; it is comparable in this sense to other neuropsychological tests in its ability to differentiate between brain damage and mental illness. The test is used to diagnose and determine the nature of cognitive impairment, including the location of the brain damage, to understand the patient's brain structure and abilities, to pinpoint causes of behavior, and to help plan treatment.
The Delis–Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS) is a neuropsychological test used to measure a variety of verbal and nonverbal executive functions for both children and adults. This assessment was developed over the span of a decade by Dean Delis, Edith Kaplan, and Joel Kramer, and it was published in 2001. The D-KEFS comprises nine tests that were designed to stand alone. Therefore, there are no aggregate measures or composite scores for an examinee's performance. A vast majority of these tests are modified, pre-existing measures ; however, some of these measures are new indices of executive functions.
The Wechsler Test of Adult Reading (WTAR) is a neuropsychological assessment tool used to provide a measure of premorbid intelligence, the degree of Intellectual function prior to the onset of illness or disease.
Judgment of Line Orientation (JLO) is a standardized test of visuospatial skills commonly associated with functioning of the parietal lobe in the right hemisphere. The test measures a person's ability to match the angle and orientation of lines in space. Subjects are asked to match two angled lines to a set of 11 lines that are arranged in a semicircle and separated 18 degrees from each other. The complete test has 30 items, but short forms have also been created. There is normative data available for ages 7-96.
References
- ↑ Rhonda M. Ross (2005). The D2 Test of Attention: An Examination of Age, Gender, and Cross-cultural Indices. Argosy University.
- ↑ Margaret Semrud-Clikeman; Phyllis Anne Teeter Ellison (15 June 2009). Child Neuropsychology: Assessment and Interventions for Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 2nd Edition. Springer. p. 111. ISBN 978-0-387-88963-4.
- ↑ Michel Leclercq; Peter Zimmermann (4 April 2002). Applied Neuropsychology of Attention: Theory, Diagnosis and Rehabilitation. Psychology Press. p. 193. ISBN 978-1-135-43178-5.
- ↑ Otfried Spreen (19 February 1998). A Compendium of Neuropsychological Tests: Administration, Norms, and Commentary. Oxford University Press. p. 240. ISBN 978-0-19-510019-8.
- ↑ Hedrih, Vladimir (2024-01-14). "Selective attention scores of adults have been increasing over generations, study finds". PsyPost. Retrieved 2024-01-17.