NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATIONS

This evaluation consists of measures of cognitive and achievement functioning, attention and executive functioning, auditory processing skills, memory skills, visual motor skills and visual integration skills. More comprehensive interviews with teachers and parents and more detailed personality and attention deficit assessments are also conducted.

This assessment can be particularly helpful in cases where children exhibit dysphonetic or orthographic or mixed dyslexias, possible pervasive developmental disorder or attention deficit disorder. It is appropriate when highly specialized remediation is desired.

The methodology and rationale underlying a clinical neuropsychological assessment gives a view of the client’s deficits which would be overlooked by those who are not familiar with its methodology. Neuropsychological testing in a clinical setting is designed to measure cognitive/behavioral manifestations of normal and problematic brain functioning to understand which areas of the brain or the connectivity to these areas could be the cause of the underlying difficulty presented. These functions are broadly categorized as sensory/perceptual, motor, language, attention, memory and executive. Each of these categories are subdivided: for example, major processes subsumed under the rubric of memory include free recall, working memory, procedural and episodic memory with different systems for remembering auditory, verbal and visual information.  Example are the systems located in areas of left temporal lobe and visual word form area which are areas that relate to dyslexia and reading disorders.

Decisions as to whether or not there is problematic functioning are based on the pattern of test results rather than on any individual score in isolation. The underlying rationale is that with the majority of difficulties, some neural systems are unaffected, while the functioning of others are diminished. The neuropsychological functions mediated by the problematic areas will be negatively impacted, while the behaviors controlled by the intact systems will be less affected. Accordingly, neuropsychological test performance that depends on behaviors controlled by problematic areas will decline, while tests less reliant on such behaviors will be normal.