A practical, clinical test for organic brain damage

Abstract

The investigation sought to devise a practical method of detecting brain damage by testing intellectual deterioration. The test battery devised included one test, the 1937 Stanford-Binet Vocabulary Test, that is relatively insensitive to brain damage, 9 interpolated tests, and 6 tests sensitive to brain deterioration. The deterioration tests involve learning and retention of new associations in both visual and auditory spheres. The subjects used consisted principally of 25 institutional patients diagnosed as having cerebral damage (D group) and 25 control subjects, mostly institutional cases, without diagnosis of brain damage (C group), the two groups being matched for age and vocabulary scores. Scores on each deterioration test as well as total deterioration score discriminate significantly (the lowest C.R. being 6.8) between C and D groups. By means of a regression equation using age and vocabulary scores, a predicted score was obtained. Subtraction of deterioration score from predicted score, the result expressed in a modified T score, yielded a measure of deterioration. This measure separated C and D groups with an overlap of only 13.5%. A short form of the battery (about 15 min.) discriminated almost as well as the long form (about 30 min.). The correlation between scores on short and long forms was .99. The test battery has proved useful clinically. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)