Neuropsychological assessment is a performance-based method to assess cognitive functioning. This method is used to examine the cognitive consequences of brain damage, brain disease, and severe mental illness.

Typically, neuropsychological assessment is performed with a battery approach, which involves tests of a variety of cognitive ability areas.  These ability areas include skills such as memory, attention, processing speed, reasoning, judgment, and problem-solving, spatial, and language functions.

One of the most popular battery, the Neuropsychological Assessment Battery orNAB (Stern & White, 2003) consists of five domain-specific modules: Attention, Language, Memory, Spatial, and Executive Functions. A sixth module, Screening, allows the clinician to determine which of the other five domain-specific modules are appropriate to administer to an individual patient.

The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale 4th Edition (WAIS-IV) measures of learning, memory and processing speed are the neuropsychological domains that are most sensitive to acquired brain impairment in general. The Wechsler scales have played an important role in this Neuropsychological assessment and cognitive neuroscience. The WAIS-IV is intended to measure intellectual functioning, incorporating verbal, analogical, sequential, and quantitative reasoning, as well as working memory and psychomotor processing speed.

The assessment battery can be standardized or targeted to the individual participant in the assessment.

A critical concept in neuropsychological assessment is normative comparison. This involves taking the performance of an individual at the time they are tested and comparing that performance to reference groups of the same age, sex, race, and educational attainment.

At Texas Brain Institute, NAB and WAIS-IV are conducted by a Board-Certified clinical Neuropsychologist. He is an expert witness and has been deposed over 100 times.

In order for Texas Brain Institute to proceed with scheduling NAB, please call 1-888-900-1TBI or email refer@tbi.clinic.