What is Neuropsychology?
What is Neuropsychology?
What is Neuropsychology?
The relationship between brain & function.
The Definition of Neuropsychology
Neuropsychology
is defined as the branch of psychology that deals with the relationship between the brain and function such as language, memory, and emotion.
One way to think of neuropsychology is to compare it to an MRI. While an MRI scan evaluates the structure of the brain, neuropsychological testing evaluates the function of the brain. The results of a diagnostic neuropsychological evaluation can lead to answers that provide a roadmap for treatment and accommodations.
Neuropsychologists
are clinical psychologists that are fellowship trained in the field of neuropsychology. This makes them experts in the administration and interpretation of testing and testing results.
Why pursue neuropsychological evaluation?
Everyone has areas of thinking ability in which they are stronger or weaker. Neuropsychological evaluation can help identify your cognitive strengths and weaknesses relative to your personal cognitive profile and relative to population norms. For some, their strengths help shore up their weaknesses so that they never notice their areas of weakness. For others, some areas of weakness may be negatively impacting their overall functioning, making it difficult to put forth their best effort at school, at work, or in their personal relationships. Through neuropsychological testing, we can partner with you to identify those strengths and weaknesses, and to identify cognitive strategies that may help you achieve your potential. In certain cases, we can also partner with you to suggest and advocate for appropriate workplace and academic accommodations.
Neuropsychological evaluation can also help you establish a baseline level of functioning against which to benchmark the results of any future evaluations. In this way, we can help determine whether your cognitive functioning has changed over time, something that is particularly useful if you want to see if therapeutic and rehabilitative efforts have improved your overall cognitive functioning.
Neuropsychological evaluation incorporates information and data gathered from clinical interview, collateral reports (e.g. family and teachers), medical records, and neuroimaging results to determine the underlying cause of the cognitive difficulties that you or your loved one are experiencing. There may be multiple possible factors that influence our cognitive functioning on any given day, such as mood, physical health, situational stressors, and brain integrity. Your clinician will share their clinical opinion with you after having considered each of these possible influences on your current cognitive functioning.