Cogn Assessment

• o Cognition: process, organize, and
• communicate information (includes executive cognition, SOAP ID
• o Emotion: feeling and motivational
• aspects of behavior

• Sequencing
• Organizing
• Abstracting
• Planning
• Inhibiting
• Directing

• Frontal
• Parietal
• Occipital
• Temporal

language

spatial, organization

• relay station, information goes through (except
• olfactory)

memory consolidation

associated with emotion (e.g. fear response)

• Diagnosis
• Screening
• Treatment Planning
• Evaluation

• Dementia (which one?)
• Learning Disability
• Psychiatric Condition (depression, anxiety)
• Other Neurological Conditions

• To identify persons in need of further diagnostic evaluation
• Mini-Mental Status Exam
• RBANS: memory, language, verbal fluency

• Memory difficulties
• Learning accommodations
• Medication suggestions (more or less)

• Repeat Assessments
• -Evaluate improvement due to therapy·
• -Improvement from head injury or brain surgery
• -Improvement of delirium

Concepts of intelligence are attempts to clarify and organize this complex set of phenomena

• “good sense” faculty of adapting one’s self to circumstances
• mainly studied children

capacity to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with environment

• set of skills of problem solving
• -Study normal and subnormal
• -Paper and pencil formats rule out other types of intelligence

goal-directed adaptive behavior; analytic, creative, and practical

• Low- likely to be divorced, incarcerated
• High- more education, higher status jobs

• General intelligence factor
• Charles Spearman- factor analysis of various tests à all positively correlated
• must be measuring unique dimension of mental ability

• Fluid Intelligence
• Crystallized Intelligence

reason, form concepts, and solve problems with unfamiliar information

acquired knowledge (i.e. vocabulary)

how likely is it that the test will pick up something (e.g. mental retardation)

testing for normality (is patient “normal”? Will it detect the absence of condition?)

• False-Positive- saying something’s wrong when it’s not
• False-Negative- saying something isn’t wrong when it is

• a way of looking at someone’s performance qualitatively
• Looking at how people arrive at answers
• Are they elaborative? Do they get frustrated? Do they get Block Designs correctly even if it’s after the allotted time?

• Global Composite Level (FSIQ vs. GAI)
• Specific Composite (VCI, PRI, WMI, PSI)
• Subtest
• Item

• takes out effects of processing speed and working memory
• If any of the indices have a 23+ point difference- it’s a significant discrepancy

• Standard Score: m = 100, SD = 15
• Scaled Score: m = 10, SD = 3

• VCI- left hemisphere (language dominant)
• PRI- right hemisphere (spatial tasks)
• WMI- Prefrontal Cortex
• PSI- Subcortical

language disorder

• misperception of stimuli (but neurologically intact)
• Loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective
• Prosopagnosia: cannot recognize familiar faces
• Anosognosia: denial of any deficits (lack of insight)

failure to carry out purposeful movements

clouding of consciousness, sudden onset, confusion, clears up if treated

• Premorbid- impairment; have they declined cognitively?
• Deficiency- how will they function in the real world?

• inferring about the real world
• how will the person function?

• Cortical- higher order processing
• Subcortical- processing speed

repeat same word, idea, get stuck

drawn by the stimulus, have trouble disengaging

utilize stimulus

• Generalized
• Partial

repetitive behaviors (start picking clothes, patting head)

clinical manifestations of a seizure

• Aura
• anxiety, sense of fear

seizure

continuous seizure

• Time of lost consciousness
• Posttraumatic Amnesia

• Statistical Deviation
• Mental Health Deviation
• Social Norm Deviation
• Distress to self/others
• Seek Treatment
• Impaired Functioning
• DSM Listings

• Norm-referenced tests
• Interviews
• Observations
• Informal assessment procedures

• Correlation between the test and a variable, how can the test predict the future
• Predictive: omeasures can predict future instances of ____
• Concurrent: assessing two things at the same time
• Retrospective or Postdictive Validity: worst kind, how does IQ predict previous occurences?

• capture content of construct you’re trying to measure
• Subjective: ask a professional
• Objective: statistical measures

• Correlate with something that wouldn't correlate
• -Depression Scale vs. Happiness Scale
• Should show an inverse relationship

correlate your new test with old test to see if they have a high correlation

• Consistency
• Reliability precedes Validity

• Intellectual:
• -Orientation
• -Attention
• -Language
• -Memory
• -Spatial
• -Executive
• -Motor Sensory

• Impaired social reciprocity, communication disorders, and cognitive deficits
• Cognitive: poor verbal comprehension; intact spatial cognition and rote memory
• Symptoms:
• -Delayed speech
• -Echolalia
• -Idiosyncratic speech
• -Vocabulary and comprehension disorders
• -Grammatical immaturity
• -Rate, tone, and pitch abnormalities
• -Gaze avoidance and stereotypic behaviors
• Comorbidity:
• -ADHD
• -MR
• -Epilepsy
• -Aggressive and impulsive disorders

• Significant and chronic impairment of social interaction and/or repetitive patterns of behavior
• Language impairment is NOT present
• Speech is often flat, dull, monotonous
• Poor social reciprocity

• Currently 3 subtypes
• Involves disturbances in attention span, self-regulation, activity level, and impulse control
• Previous monikers: minimal brain damage; hyperkinetic syndrome, ADD
• Inhibition is key: an inability to delay a response long enough to evaluate various alternative behaviors – not responsive to feedback

• No law breaking
• Negativistic behavior

• Theft, truancy, fire-setting
• Unlawful
• Disregard for rules

• X chromosome is compressed or broken
• Most common in males, and more profound effect since males have only one X chromosome
• Mild to severe retardation
• Very poor spatial cognition
• Hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli; echolalia, rapid speech

• Extra X chromosome is present – more common of the genetic disorders
• Infertility, male breast development, underdeveloped masculine build, social-cognitive difficulties

• ‘Von Reckinghausen’s’ disease
• Spots of skin pigmentation (café au lait spots)
• Benign tumors on/under skin (neurofibromas)
• Tumors in the iris (Lisch nodules)
• Focal brain lesions
• Freckles in unexposed body areas
• High rates of learning disabilities, behavior problems; visual-spatial disorders

• CNS involvement, including heart, lungs, bones, kidneys
• Distinct facial lesions: adenoma
• sebaceum
• Amelanotic naevus – present on fact, trunk or limbs
• CNS lesions result from abnormal proliferation of brain cells and glia during development
• Tubers occur in the convolution of brain tissue
• Cognitive deficits, epilepsy, hemiplegia

• Show delayed development, overactivity, motor clumsiness, attention deficits, learning disorders, MR, and seizure disorders
• Shorter than expected eye opening, flattening of the mid-face, short nose, indistinct ridges between the nose and mouth, tiny upper lip

difficulty learning to read despite IQ

• Manifest:·
• Motor coordination
• Social awkwardness
• Visual-spatial Function Impaired

Visual cortex, visual processing

integrates sensory information from different modalities, particularly determining spatial sense and navigation

higher order processing

• involved in auditory perception
• processes semantics in speech and vision
• contains hippocampus and plays key role in long-term memory formation

• coined psychometric intelligence
• did not succeed in constructing true IQ test
• simple reaction time, strength of squeeze, keenness of sight-sensory and motor abilities

• Tests of practical judgement
• -directions/commands
• -arithmetical problem
• -synonym-antonym
• -information (general fund of knowledge)

• Non-verbal test
• -Maze
• -Cube analysis
• -Pictorial Completion

3 IQ point increase per decade

• Field of study concerned with the theory and techinique of psychological measurement (measure of cognition, abilities, attitudes, personality traits)
• Primary Concern: construction and validation of measurement instruments

• The assignment of numerals to objects or events according to rules
• In the physical sciences: numerical estimate and expression of the magnitude of one quantity relative to another

• Objectivity
• Quanitification (measuring abstract concepts with numerals)
• Communication
• Economy
• Scientific Generalization

• Labeling, dichotomous, categorical
• Cannot interpret the numbers to reveal anything quanititative

• Mutually Exclusive: each subject/observation is assigned to one and only one category
• Exhaustive: all observations are classified into specific categories

• Ranking numbers
• Reveals direction

• Magnitude and Direction
• No absolute zero

Direction, Magnitude, Equal Distances, and an Absolute Zero

• X = t + e
• Score = true score + error
• True Score: true score estimated through observed score
• Error Score: the observed score deviates from the true score due to influence of error (random sources that can move scores up/down relative to true score)

How scores vary from the average/mean score for the sample (larger variance means the scores are more spread out)

• Test-Retest
• Parallel Forms (Alternate Forms)
• Internal Consistency

Same test given on two different occassions: should be highly correlated if it's consistent

Two different measures of the same construct

Multiple items on a single test should converge on the same conclusions about true scores

• Standardization
• Aggregation- using many tests to measure one construct

Are you measuring what you say you're measuring?

• Whether a given measure actually assesses whether the underlying conceptual or construct
• Convergent Validity
• Divergent Validity

• Question of wheter a particular measure provides explanatory power over and above another measure in predicting relevant criterion
• -Does motivation predict academic performance over and above that which is predicted by IQ?

assess if the person is faking bad

An orderly assessment of the important cognitive and emotional functions that are commonly and characteristically disturbed in patients with organic brain disease

• Ataxic: unsteady, wide-based (cerebellum problems)
• Atalgic: painful, limping
• Functional: psychiatric

Difficulty in calculation

Inability to calculate

difficulty writing

Inability to write

Employs psychometric instruments to examine the effects of brain function on behavior

Verbal expression, articulation

Comprehension, fluency

• Damage to right parietal lobe
• Inattention to left/right
• Can be visual, auditory, tactile

• "weird"- cognitive problems
• "walking"- balance/gait problems
• "water"- wet themselves

verbal tests, less vulnerable to brain damage