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There is an increasing demand for alternate-form neuropsychological tests that can be used in clinical trials with little risk of direct practice effect. Although the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test (BVMT) includes six equivalent alternate forms, its administration is limited to an immediate and 25-min delayed free-recall trial. We now present a revised version of the BVMT called the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-Revised (BVMT-R) that includes three learning trials, a 25-min delayed recall trial, and a delayed yes/no recognition task. A new scoring system, which accounts for the location of test stimuli as well as the accuracy of recall, is also introduced. Using these new administration and scoring procedures, we administered the BVMT-R to 261 neuropsychiatric patients and 456 normal healthy adults. The results indicated that the test has excellent interform reliability, and the construct and criterion-related validity of the test were supported in studies using clinical samples. Although the BVMT-R is not without its limitations, the test's brevity and alternate-form capacity make it a valuable instrument for serial neuropsychological assessments.We recently presented a newly developed, multiple-form test of Visuospatial memory called the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test (BVMT;. Modeled after the Visual Reproduction subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scales (Russell, 1975;1988;Wechsler 1945Wechsler , 1987, the test was created to provide a quick means of assessing visual memory, using multiple test forms. In its original version, the BVMT required patients to reproduce as many figures as possible from an array of six figures, which was presented for 10 s. A delayed recall trial was administered 25 min after the immediate recall trial. Our results demonstrated that the six BVMT forms are equivalent in difficulty and that the recall scores discriminate brain-injured patients from normal controls.

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Few studies have demonstrated language impairment in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) compared to healthy controls. The purpose of this investigation was to examine language functions, specifically naming, comprehension, and verbal fluency, in patients with MS and healthy controls to (1) determine if patients with MS demonstrate language impairment, and (2) provide clarification of MS-related language disturbance, particularly in patients with MS of differing courses. Results showed that both chronic-progressive and relapsing-remitting patients with MS performed significantly more poorly than controls on naming, aural comprehension, letter fluency, and category fluency, as well as other language-based cognitive measures. Chronic-progressive patients obtained significantly lower scores than relapsing-remitting patients on the latter three tests. The language disturbance in this MS sample may be partly explained by impairment in other verbal cognitive functions. These findings highlight the importance of assessing language abilities in patients with MS.

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