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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.
Anosognosia is a condition in which a person with a disability is cognitively unaware of having it due to an underlying physical or psychological condition. Anosognosia can result from physiological damage to brain structures, typically to the parietal lobe or a diffuse lesion on the fronto-temporal-parietal area in the right hemisphere, and is thus a neuropsychiatric disorder. A deficit of self-awareness, it was first named by the neurologist Joseph Babinski in 1914. Phenomenologically, anosognosia has similarities to denial, which is a psychological defense mechanism; attempts have been made at a unified explanation. Anosognosia is sometimes accompanied by asomatognosia, a form of neglect in which patients deny ownership of body parts such as their limbs. The term is from Ancient Greek ἀ- a-, 'without', νόσος nosos, 'disease' and γνῶσις gnōsis, 'knowledge'. It is also considered a disorder that makes the treatment of the patient more difficult, since it may affect negatively the therapeutic relationship.
Clinical neuropsychology is a sub-field of 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.
Nonverbal learning disability (NVLD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by core deficits in visual-spatial processing in the presence of intact verbal ability. Additional diagnostic criteria include Average to Superior verbal intelligence and deficits in visuoconstruction abilities, fine-motor coordination, mathematical reasoning, visuospatial memory and social skills. In clinical settings, some diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder would be more appropriately classified as NVLD.
Reduplicative paramnesia is the delusional belief that a place or location has been duplicated, existing in two or more places simultaneously, or that it has been 'relocated' to another site. It is one of the delusional misidentification syndromes; although rare, it is most commonly associated with acquired brain injury, particularly simultaneous damage to the right cerebral hemisphere and to both frontal lobes.
Frontal lobe disorder, also frontal lobe syndrome, is an impairment of the frontal lobe that occurs due to disease or frontal lobe injury. The frontal lobe of the brain plays a key role in executive functions such as motivation, planning, social behaviour, and speech production. Frontal lobe syndrome can be caused by a range of conditions including head trauma, tumours, neurodegenerative diseases, Neurodevelopmental disorders, neurosurgery and cerebrovascular disease. Frontal lobe impairment can be detected by recognition of typical signs and symptoms, use of simple screening tests, and specialist neurological testing.
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."
The Hayling and Brixton tests are neuropsychological tests of executive function created by psychologists Paul W. Burgess and Tim Shallice. It is composed of two tests, the Hayling Sentence Completion Test and the Brixton Spatial Awareness Test.
Autotopagnosia from the Greek a and gnosis, meaning "without knowledge", topos meaning "place", and auto meaning "oneself", autotopagnosia virtually translates to the "lack of knowledge about one's own space," and is clinically described as such.
The Benton Visual Retention Test is an individually administered test for people aged from eight years to adulthood that measures visual perception and visual memory. It can also be used to help identify possible learning disabilities among other conditions that might affect an individual's memory. The individual examined is shown ten designs, one at a time, and asked to reproduce each one as exactly as possible on plain paper from memory. The test is untimed, and the results are professionally scored by form, shape, pattern, and arrangement on the paper.
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.
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 Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS) is a neuropsychological test designed to measure different memory functions in a person. Anyone ages 16 to 90 is eligible to take this test. The current version is the fourth edition (WMS-IV) which was published in 2009 and which was designed to be used with the WAIS-IV. A person's performance is reported as five Index Scores: Auditory Memory, Visual Memory, Visual Working Memory, Immediate Memory, and Delayed Memory. The WMS-IV also incorporates an optional cognitive exam that helps to assess global cognitive functioning in people with suspected memory deficits or those who have been diagnosed with a various neural, psychiatric and/or developmental disorders. This may include conditions such as dementias or mild learning difficulties.
Constructional apraxia is characterized by an inability or difficulty to build, assemble, or draw objects. Apraxia is a neurological disorder in which people are unable to perform tasks or movements even though they understand the task, are willing to complete it, and have the physical ability to perform the movements. Constructional apraxia may be caused by lesions in the parietal lobe following stroke or it may serve as an indicator for Alzheimer's disease.
The Boston Naming Test (BNT), introduced in 1983 by Edith Kaplan, Harold Goodglass and Sandra Weintraub, is a widely used neuropsychological assessment tool to measure confrontational word retrieval in individuals with aphasia or other language disturbance caused by stroke, Alzheimer's disease, or other dementing disorder. A common and debilitating feature is anomic aphasia, an impairment in the ability to name objects. The BNT contains 60 line drawings graded in difficulty. Patients with anomia often have greater difficulties with the naming of not only difficult and low frequency objects but also easy and high frequency objects. Naming difficulties may be rank ordered along a continuum. Items are rank ordered in terms of their ability to be named, which is correlated with their frequency. This type of picture-naming test is also useful in the examination of children with learning disabilities and the evaluation of brain-injured adults.
Controlled Oral Word Association Test, abbreviated COWA or COWAT, is a verbal fluency test that measures spontaneous production of words belonging to the same category or beginning with some designated letter.
The d2 Test of Attention is a neuropsychological measure of selective and sustained attention and visual scanning speed. It is a paper and pencil test that asks participants to cross out any letter "d" with two marks around above it or below it in any order. The surrounding distractors are usually similar to the target stimulus, for example a "p" with two marks or a "d" with one or three marks. The original version of the test was created by Brickenkamp (1981) in Germany as a cancellation task.
The Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination (ACE) and its subsequent versions are neuropsychological tests used to identify cognitive impairment in conditions such as dementia.
The Boston Process Approach is a neurological assessment tool developed by Edith Kaplan and her colleagues, Harold Goodglass, Nelson Butters, Laird Cermak, and Norman Geschwind at the Boston Veterans Medical Center. The main purpose of the Boston Process Approach is to assess brain damage as well as cognitive impairments in patients through a series of tests that are related to memory, attention, intelligence, and other aspects of information processing. This approach is one of the more flexible and qualitative neurological assessments because it emphasizes how a patient performs a task instead of whether they succeeded or failed at it.
References
- ↑ Igor Grant MD; Kenneth Adams PhD (8 February 2009). Neuropsychological Assessment of Neuropsychiatric and Neuromedical Disorders. Oxford University Press. p. 74. ISBN 978-0-19-970280-0.
- 1 2 Maura Mitrushina (10 February 2005). Handbook of Normative Data for Neuropsychological Assessment. Oxford University Press. p. 284. ISBN 978-0-19-516930-0.
- ↑ Andrew Steptoe; Kenneth Freedland; J. Richard Jennings; Maria M. Llabre; Stephen B Manuck; Elizabeth J. Susman (27 September 2010). Handbook of Behavioral Medicine: Methods and Applications. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 127. ISBN 978-0-387-09488-5.
- ↑ Martin L. Albert; Janice E. Knoefel (3 March 2011). Clinical Neurology of Aging. Oxford University Press. p. 84. ISBN 978-0-19-536929-8.
- ↑ Michael D. Franzen (31 October 2000). Reliability and Validity in Neuropsychological Assessment. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 156. ISBN 978-0-306-46344-0.
- ↑ David W. Eby; Lisa J. Molnar; Paula S. Kartje (22 December 2008). Maintaining Safe Mobility in an Aging Society. CRC Press. p. 160. ISBN 978-1-4200-6454-4.
- ↑ Barbara Landau; James E. Hoffman (18 October 2012). Spatial Representation: From Gene to Mind. Oxford University Press. p. 80. ISBN 978-0-19-538537-3.
- ↑ Sam Goldstein; Cecil R. Reynolds (24 June 2011). Handbook of Neurodevelopmental and Genetic Disorders in Children, 2/e. Guilford Press. p. 328. ISBN 978-1-60918-000-3.
- ↑ David Gozal; Dennis L. Molfese (28 October 2007). Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: From Genes to Patients. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 169. ISBN 978-1-59259-891-5.
- ↑ Margaret Semrud-Clikeman; Phyllis Anne Teeter Ellison (15 June 2009). Child Neuropsychology: Assessment and Interventions for Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 2nd Edition. Springer. pp. 172–. ISBN 978-0-387-88963-4.
- 1 2 Muriel Deutsch Lezak (2004). Neuropsychological Assessment. Oxford University Press. p. 390. ISBN 978-0-19-511121-7.