Background: Research into the neuropsychology of pediatric obsessive--compulsive disorder (OCD) reveals inconsistent results, limiting the ability to draw conclusions about possible neurocognitive deficits in youth with OCD. The aim of this study was to conduct a meta-analysis of the available literature. Methods: We identified 36 studies, of…

Whereas neuroimaging studies of healthy subjects have demonstrated an association between the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and cognitive control functions, including response monitoring and error detection, lesion studies are sparse and have produced mixed results. Due to largely normal behavioral test results in two patients with medial…

We examined whether the General Factor of Personality (GFP) is related to the "g" factor of cognitive ability using data from the Vietnam Experience Study which randomly sampled 4462 Vietnam War veterans from a total sample of about five million Vietnam era army veterans. Exclusionary criteria included passing a fitness test, achieving a…

Background: Half of pediatric-onset OCD cases remit by adulthood. Studies have demonstrated that initial response to pharmacotherapy, age of onset, prominent hoarding symptoms, and the presence of comorbid tic disorders are associated with long-term outcome. Our goal was to examine the association between childhood performance on…

Background: Although distinctive neuropsychological impairments have been delineated in children with chromosome 22q11 deletion syndrome (22q11DS), social skills and social cognition remain less well-characterised. Objective: To examine social skills and social cognition and their relationship with neuropsychological function/behaviour and…

Phenomena of clustering and subjective organization in free recall are defined by recall-order consistency, which is assumed to reflect the organization a subject imposes upon material he is required to memorize. Contiguity of experience ("thinking" about items together) is proposed as the dominant force underlying this consistency. (Author/FWB)

Research supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education, Bureau of Research. Reprints from: Arthur Whimbey, Dept of Psychology, California State College, 25800 Hillary St., Hayward, California 94542.

Neuropsychology combines psychometrics and the study of brain processes. There are two approaches to neuropsychology. The neurologic approach uses brief tests flexibly. The psychometric approach uses standardized graded scales in a set battery. Cortical testing in the form of intellectual abilities testing is 70 years old, yet psychometric…

Analyzed the performance of Alzheimer's patients (N=141) on the Mini-Mental State Examination. Performance on all items showed significant negative correlation with the duration of the illness. The most difficult item was "recall," and the improvement in recall was obtained with cuing. (Author/ABB)

The Embellishment score on the Memory-For-Designs Test (MFD) may be a useful predictor of confabulation. Male (N=16) patients who were judged by staff to be habitual confabulators embellished their drawings on the MFD twice as frequently as a group of 16 patients of similar age (40-80) and diagnosis judged to be nonconfabulators. (Author)

Describes a paper-and-pencil method for producing reaction-time data suitable for group situations. The technique was constructed to contrast the two traditional theoretical approaches to semantic memory but can be applied to other questions of cognitive psychology. (Author/CK)

We carried out the first neuropsychological study of a series of patients with functional amnesia. We evaluated 10 patients, first with a neurological examination and then with three tests of anterograde amnesia and four tests of retrograde amnesia. Excluding one patient who later admitted to malingering, all patients had a significant premorbid…

An adaptive network model is proposed to represent the structure and processing of knowledge. Accessibility of subjects' stored information was measured. Relationships exist among (a) frequency of verifying a test relation, (b) other relations involving concepts used to evaluate test relation, (c) frequency of verifying those relations. (CHK)

A variant of the Peterson (1959) paradigm was used to investigate retrieval of single pairs of items varying in imagery value. Latency to respond showed that if one item was concrete, no differential retrieval speeds were found. This result supports an organizational view of imagery. (CHK)