Neuropsychological Services

A neuropsychological evaluation is intended to explore many different kinds of brain functions.  Understanding areas of strength and weakness as well as dysfunction and impairment can shed light on an individual’s successes and failures.  It helps to make an accurate differential diagnosis, develop accommodation strategies, and, make medication and rehabilitation recommendations.  Sometimes, an individual with generally normal functioning still can have significant intracognitive strengths and weaknesses.  Understanding these can be very helpful when making decisions about educational and vocational choices.  Neuropsychological evaluation typically includes a thorough measure of many brain functions such as:

• General Intelligence (IQ)

• Academic Achievement

• Attention Skills

• Processing Speed Capacity

• Executive Functioning – including cognitive flexibility, categorization skills, problem-solving ability, capacity for abstraction, reasoning and conceptualization

• Memory – including short-term memory, working memory, learning and long-term storage in both verbal and visuospatial domains

• Visuospatial Skills – including perception, processing and conceptualization

• Language Skills – including word finding, fluency, expression, perception, processing and conceptualization

• Motor Skills – including fine/gross-motor speed/strength/coordination

• Sensory Skills – including audition, vision and tactile sensation

• Adaptive/Functional Living Skills

• Emotional Functioning – including personality and psychiatric functioning  

There are many situations that my trigger the need for a neuropsychological evaluation to increase clinical understanding.