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An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardised tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. The abbreviation "IQ" was coined by the psychologist William Stern for the German term Intelligenzquotient, his term for a scoring method for intelligence tests at University of Breslau he advocated in a 1912 book.
Rehabilitation of sensory and cognitive function typically involves methods for retraining neural pathways or training new neural pathways to regain or improve neurocognitive functioning that have been diminished by disease or trauma. The main objective outcome for rehabilitation is to assist in regaining physical abilities and improving performance. Three common neuropsychological problems treatable with rehabilitation are attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), concussion, and spinal cord injury. Rehabilitation research and practices are a fertile area for clinical neuropsychologists, rehabilitation psychologists, and others.
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.
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.
The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) is an IQ test designed to measure intelligence and cognitive ability in adults and older adolescents. The original WAIS was published in February 1955 by David Wechsler, as a revision of the Wechsler–Bellevue Intelligence Scale, released in 1939. It is currently in its fourth edition (WAIS-IV) released in 2008 by Pearson, and is the most widely used IQ test, for both adults and older adolescents, in the world.
The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) is an individually administered intelligence test for children between the ages of 6 and 16. The Fifth Edition is the most recent version.
The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the 2007 edition of which is known as the PPVT-IV, is an untimed test of receptive vocabulary for Standard American English and is intended to provide a quick estimate of the examinee’s receptive vocabulary ability. It can be used with the Expressive Vocabulary Test-Second Edition (EVT-2) to make a direct comparison between the examinee’s receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. The PPVT was developed in 1959 by special education specialists Lloyd M. Dunn and Leota M. Dunn. The current version lists L.M. Dunn and his son D.M. Dunn as authors.
The Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (KABC) is a clinical instrument for assessing cognitive development. Its construction incorporates several recent developments in both psychological theory and statistical methodology. The test was developed by Alan S. Kaufman and Nadeen L. Kaufman in 1983 and revised in 2004. The test has been translated and adopted for many countries, such as the Japanese version of the K-ABC by the Japanese psychologists Tatsuya Matsubara, Kazuhiro Fujita, Hisao Maekawa, and Toshinori Ishikuma.
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.
Post-traumatic amnesia (PTA) is a state of confusion that occurs immediately following a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in which the injured person is disoriented and unable to remember events that occur after the injury. The person may be unable to state their name, where they are, and what time it is. When continuous memory returns, PTA is considered to have resolved. While PTA lasts, new events cannot be stored in the memory. About a third of patients with mild head injury are reported to have "islands of memory", in which the patient can recall only some events. During PTA, the patient's consciousness is "clouded". Because PTA involves confusion in addition to the memory loss typical of amnesia, the term "post-traumatic confusional state" has been proposed as an alternative.
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 National Adult Reading Test (NART) is a widely accepted and commonly used method in clinical settings for estimating premorbid intelligence levels of 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.
The Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Test Battery (HRNB) and allied procedures is a comprehensive suite of neuropsychological tests used to assess the condition and functioning of the brain, including etiology, type, localization and lateralization of brain injury. The HRNB was first constructed by Ward C. Halstead, who was chairman of the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago, together with his doctoral student, Ralph Reitan. A major aim of administering the HRNB to patients was if possible to lateralize a lesion to either the left or right cerebral hemisphere by comparing the functioning on both sides of the body on a variety of tests such as the Suppression or Sensory Imperception Test, the Finger Agnosia Test, Finger Tip Writing, the Finger Tapping Test, and the Tactual Performance Test. One difficulty with the HRNB was its excessive administration time. In particular, administration of the Halstead Category Test was lengthy, so subsequent attempts were made to construct reliable and valid short-forms.
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.
Hold tests are neuropsychological tests which measure abilities which are thought to be largely resistant to cognitive decline following neurological damage. As a result, these tests are widely used for estimating premorbid intelligence in conditions such as dementia, traumatic brain injury, and stroke.
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 Disability Rating Scale (DRS) was developed as a way to track a traumatic brain injury (TBI) patient from 'Coma to Community'. The scale was used to rate the effects of injury and decide how long recovery might take. The rating gives insight into the cognitive impairment of the individual with the TBI.
The Westmead Post-traumatic Amnesia Scale (WPTAS) is a brief bedside standardised test that measures length of post-traumatic amnesia (PTA) in people with traumatic brain injury. It consists of twelve questions that assess orientation to person, place and time, and ability to consistently retain new information from one day to another. It is administered once a day, each and every day, until the patient achieves a perfect score across three consecutive days, after which the individual is deemed to have emerged from post-traumatic amnesia. PTA may be deemed to be over on the first day of a recall of 12 for those who have been in PTA for greater than four weeks. The WPTAS is the most common post-traumatic amnesia scale used in Australia and New Zealand.
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
- 1 2 3 Holdnack, H.A. (2001). Wechsler Test of Adult Reading: WTAR. San Antonio. The Psychological Corporation
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Spreen, O., & Strauss, E. (2006). A compendium of neuropsychological tests: Administration, norms, and commentary. Oxford University Press, USA.
- ↑ Green, R. E., Melo, B., Christensen, B., Ngo, L. A., Monette, G., & Bradbury, C. (2008). Measuring premorbid IQ in traumatic brain injury: An examination of the validity of the Wechsler Test of Adult Reading (WTAR). Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 30(2), 163-172.
- ↑ Hanks, R.A., Millis, S.R., Ricker, J.H., Giacino, J.T., Nakese-Richardson, R., Frol, A.B., Novack, T.A., Kalmar, K., Sherer, M., Gordon, W. (2008). The predictive validity of a brief inpatient neuropsychologic battery for person with traumatic brain injury. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 89, 950-957.
- ↑ Whitney, K. A., Shepart, P.H., Mariner, J., Mossbarger, B., Herman, S. (2010). Validity of the Wechsler Test of Adult Reading (WTAR): Effort Considered in a Clinical Sample of U.S. Military Veterans. Applied Neuropsychology: Adult, 17(3), 196-204.
- ↑ Mathias, J.L., Bowden, S.C., Bigler, E.D., Rosenfeld, J.V. (2007). Is performance on the Wechsler test of adult reading affected by traumatic brain injury? British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 46(4), 457-466.
- ↑ McFarlane, J, Welch, J, Rodgers, J. (2006). Severity of Alzheimer's disease and effect on premorbid measures of intelligence. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 45(4) 453-63.