Neuropsychological Assessment 1.0

Abstract

This chapter examines neuropsychological assessment’s developmental history. There is a discussion of the progress of the neuropsychological assessment approaches from simple extensions of either physiological psychology or neurological examinations to contemporary development of the flexible test battery. Ultimately, this involved a review of the technologies used by neuropsychologists during a period referred to as Neuropsychological Assessment 1.0. After a brief summary of neuropsychology’s “prehistory,” there will be discussion of neuropsychological assessment following nineteenth-century medicine and physiology. Here, there will be a development of qualitative approaches and neuropsychological assessments as extensions of the neurological examination. Next, there will be a discussion of the ways in which measures from Neuropsychological Assessment 1.0 developed into the quantitative batteries that continue to be used today. Neuropsychological Assessment 1.0 as conceived herein reflects both standardization and technological shifts as opposed to psychometric rigor alone.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—Santayana (1905, p. 284)