Neuropsychological measures for assessing disordered thought and perception.

Abstract

N europsychology as a discipline emphasizes the intensive and specialized study of brain-behavior relationships (Lezak et al., 2012;Miller & Maricle, 2019). Neuropsychologists work in a variety of settings, including psychiatric, medical, educational, forensic, outpatient, and private practice, and have the option of pursuing board certification in a specialty area in accord with designated prerequisites in education and training that align with practice interests (Hebben & Milberg, 2009;Miller & Maricle, 2019). Primary among the neuropsychologist's professional activities are assessment, diagnosis, and intervention. These actions span a problem base ranging from early life neurodevelopmental disorders to dementia. Evaluations address the overlapping domains of attention, executive functioning, memory, language, social cognition, visual-motor functioning, and personality functioning. Neuropsychological testing can be lengthy (Sweet et al., 2015) and requires assessor familiarity with different tests and measures (Hebben & Milberg, 2009;Miller & Maricle, 2019;Rabin et al., 2016) to quantify and qualify diagnostic complexity. In a relatively recent survey, dementia was the most frequently assessed area among neuropsychologists who work with adults, whereas pediatric neuropsychologists most often evaluate for the presence of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; Sweet et al., 2015). ADHD was also among the top five referral questions for adult neuropsychologists (Sweet et al., 2015).