Neuropsychological Battery Selector

Purpose

Selecting a neuropsychological test battery is a clinical judgment task, not a checklist exercise. A competent programmer without clinical neuropsychology training will get this wrong because:

• Not all "memory tests" test the same construct. The CVLT-II/III assesses list learning with encoding strategies; Logical Memory tests narrative recall; the BVMT-R tests visual-spatial memory. Each is sensitive to different lesion profiles (Lezak et al., 2012, Ch. 11).
• Test selection must match the referral question. A dementia screen requires different instruments than a TBI return-to-work evaluation or a pre-surgical epilepsy workup.
• Normative data are not interchangeable. Age, education, cultural background, and premorbid ability all determine which norms to apply and whether a given score is actually impaired (Mitrushina et al., 2005).
• Redundant tests waste time and fatigue patients. Over-testing degrades performance and inflates apparent impairment, particularly in older adults and those with attentional deficits (Strauss et al., 2006).

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when you need to:

• Select neuropsychological tests matched to a suspected cognitive deficit profile
• Assemble a battery for a specific referral question (dementia differential, TBI, pre-surgical, forensic)
• Advise on which cognitive domains to assess given a neurological condition
• Evaluate whether a proposed battery has adequate domain coverage or problematic redundancy