Knowledge of the literature pertaining to patterns of performance in normal individuals is essential if we are to understand intraindividual variability in neurocognitive test performance in neuropsychiatric disorders. Twenty-five healthy individuals with a high-level of education were evaluated on a short neuropsychological battery which spanned several cognitive domains. ---Results indicated that cognitive abilities are not equally distributed within a sample of healthy, high-level functioning individuals. This may be of interest to neuropsychologists who might base clinical inference about the presence of cerebral dysfunction, at least in part, on marked variation in a patient’s level of cognitive test performance. The practice of deductive reasoning in clinical neuropsychology may be prone to false-positive conclusions about cognitive functioning in neuropsychiatric disorders where base-rates of cognitive impairments are low and pre-existing educational achievements are high.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/25635 |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Creators | Jeffay, Eliyas |
| Contributors | Zakzanis, Konstantine |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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