Common Psychological Tests Applied to the Assessment of Brain Damage

Abstract

A recent survey by Sundberg (1961) identified the most common referral questions asked of clinical psychologists, and the tests most used by them to answer these referral questions. A common referral problem was that of the specification of brain damage, and the most common (10) tests were reviewed in terms of their efficiency as organic diagnostic indicators.

The tests were found to be of varying degrees of effectiveness for this purpose, although no test was unequivocally demonstrated to be an adequate assessment device for this purpose. A common underlying problem was the treatment of organicity as a unitary syndrome, which tended to result in a number of conceptual and methodological difficulties.