Effects of age of onset and medication on cognitive performance and quality of life in patients with epilepsy.

Previous research shows that earlier age of onset of epilepsy and larger antiepileptic drug (AED) load are related to cognitive impairment and lower quality of life in patients with epilepsy. However, there has been a discrepancy in the specific cognitive domains that are affected and whether AED load is a significant contributor to the cognitive impairment. This study aimed to examine (a) the specific cognitive domains that are affected by age of epilepsy onset and (b) the effects of AED treatment and age of onset on cognition and quality of life.

Taxonomy for Education and Training in Clinical Neuropsychology: past, present, and future.

Objective: Historically, the clinical neuropsychology training community has not clearly or consistently defined education or training opportunities. The lack of consistency has limited students' and trainees' ability to accurately assess and compare the intensity of neuropsychology-specific training provided by programs. To address these issues and produce greater 'truth in advertising' across programs, CNS, with SCN's Education Advisory Committee (EAC), ADECN, AITCN, and APPCN constructed a specialty-specific taxonomy, namely, the Taxonomy for Education and Training in Clinical Neuropsychology.

Functional independence in resting-state connectivity facilitates higher-order cognition.

Growing evidence suggests that intrinsic functional connectivity (i.e. highly structured patterns of communication between brain regions during wakeful rest) may encode cognitive ability.

Task-dependent recruitment of intrinsic brain networks reflects normative variance in cognition.

Background: Functional neuroimaging has great potential to inform clinical decisions, whether by identifying neural biomarkers of illness progression and severity, predicting therapeutic response, or selecting suitable patients for surgical interventions. Yet a persisting barrier to functional neuroimaging's clinical translation is our incomplete understanding of how normative variance in cognition, personality, and behavior shape the brain's structural and functional organization. We propose that modeling individual differences in these brain-behavior relationships is crucial for improving the accuracy of neuroimaging biomarkers for neurologic and psychiatric disorders.

Remediation of a naming deficit following left temporal lobe epilepsy surgery.

Dysnomia is associated with temporal lobe epilepsy and may include a deficit in recalling the names of familiar people. The deficit can worsen following surgery to relieve refractory seizures. The following is a case report comparing implicit (errorless learning) and explicit (rote rehearsal) approaches to retraining face-name associations in a 52-year-old woman who was status post-amygdalo-hippocampectomy for refractory complex partial seizures.

Merging clinical neuropsychology and functional neuroimaging to evaluate the construct validity and neural network engagement of the n-back task.

The n-back task is a widely used neuroimaging paradigm for studying the neural basis of working memory (WM); however, its neuropsychometric properties have received little empirical investigation. The present study merged clinical neuropsychology and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the construct validity of the letter variant of the n-back task (LNB) and to further identify the task-evoked networks involved in WM. Construct validity of the LNB task was investigated using a bootstrapping approach to correlate LNB task performance across clinically validated neuropsychological measures of WM to establish convergent validity, as well as measures of related but distinct cognitive constructs (i.