Definition:  Tests sensitive to brain conditions.

           Description.  Neuropsychological testing refers to a wide range of measures employed to diagnose brain damage.  Neuropsychology became particularly important during World War II when thousands of brain-injured soldiers required assessment and rehabilitation. Neuropsychological tests evaluate a wide range of constructs, including an individual’s capacity for sensory input, attention and concentration, memory, learning, language, spatial ability, reasoning and logical analysis, and motor skills.  While brain injuries can affect all of these areas, a one-to-one relation is seldom observed between an injury and a dysfunction. As a result, diagnosis often involves score profiles, with their accompanying psychometric difficulties, and a thorough patient history and interview are still required to make sense of the neurological information provided by different tasks and sources.

After a brain injury the most common change is a general intellectual impairment, that is, individuals appear less capable of abstract thinking (Goldstein, 1990).  For screening such problems assessors frequently employ cognitive tasks and tests such as the WAIS-R and Wechsler Memory Scale as well as perceptual and motor skills tests such as the Bender-Gestalt.  A more extensive set of tasks assessing a larger domain of neuropsychological categories are measured by the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery (Golden, Hammeke, & Purisch, 1980) and the Halstead-Reitan Battery (Reitan & Wolfson, 1985).

Neuropsychological assessment involves use of tests and observation for the purpose of diagnosing brain dysfunction.  Gregory (1992)  described the neuropsychological assessment of a college junior who reported the onset of poor performance in a premed curriculum after 2 years of good grades. A WAIS-R found an IQ of 122, but the student could not accurately copy a simple geometric cross, showed large differences in fine motor control (e.g., finger tapping) between the two sides of his body, and performed poorly on a measure of abstract reasoning.  Gregory (1992) reported that the copying difficulty and left hand motor slowing were indicative of right hemisphere impairment and problems with spatial relationships.  A CT scan confirmed a lesion in the frontal-pariental lobe of the right hemisphere.  The student changed majors to history and graduated with a degree in education, a switch Gregory (1992) believed made sense given the student’s strengths in the left hemisphere.  In this instance, the combination of testing, observation, and history-taking constituted effective assessment.