Neuropsychology of Everyday Functioning, Thomas D. Marcotte and Igor Grant. The Guilford Press, New York, NY (2010). 477 pp., dollar65.00

摘要

In 1981, Heaton and Pendleton published a prescient article addressing the discrepancy between the types of predictions that neuropsychologists were being asked to make and the lack of scientific research supporting the use of our assessment tools for this purpose. They pointed out the difficulties inherent in using the standardized tasks to predict real-world behavior and highlighted the great need for research in this area.It was around this time that I completed my post-doctoral fellowship and began work in an acute rehabilitation hospital. I quickly learned that this disparity was not simply an academic issue; the type of information that was being requested from me in this setting was quite different from the type that I had been trained to give. Most training programs at that time placed a strong emphasis on identification and localization of brain lesions. In the world of rehabilitation, the presence of brain damage was well-established and localization of lesions of limited interest. What was needed was information that would help predict both how this damage would impact participation in rehabilitation and functioning in the real world following discharge. To say that I was ill-prepared to provide this guidance would be an understatement, and as noted by Heaton and Pendleton, the body of research needed to guide the clinician simply did not exist.