Release of Protected Test Information Under Protective Order: Viable Solution or Illusory Safeguard? An Interorganizational† Position Paper.

Objective: To critically examine the assumption that protective orders are adequately protective of sensitive psychological/neuropsychological test information. Attorneys at times claim that to adequately cross-examine neuropsychological experts, they require direct access to protected test information, rather than having test data analyzed by retained neuropsychological experts. As a compromise, judges sometimes order that protected test information be released to attorneys under a protective order.

Attorney demands for protected psychological test information: Is access necessary for cross examination or does it lead to misinformation? An interorganizational* position paper.

Some attorneys claim that to adequately cross examine neuropsychological experts, they require direct access to protected test information, rather than having test data analyzed by retained neuropsychological experts. The objective of this paper is to critically examine whether direct access to protected test materials by attorneys is indeed necessary, appropriate, and useful to the trier-of-fact. Examples are provided of the types of nonscientific misinformation that occur when attorneys, who lack adequate training in testing, attempt to independently interpret neurocognitive/psychological test data.

The misjudgment of criminal responsibility.

Generally, a criminal statute must consist of two essential elements: a description of the forbidden act (actus reus) and a designation of a guilty mental state (mens rea). For a crime to be committed, an individual must commit the forbidden act with the culpable mental state. For any criminal act, both criminal liability and the possible punishment turn largely on retrospective judgments by legal decision-makers about what a defendant was or was not thinking at the time of committing the forbidden act.

Caution warranted in extrapolating from Boston Naming Test item gradation construct.

The Boston Naming Test (BNT) was designed to present items in order of difficulty based on word frequency. Changes in word frequencies over time, however, would frustrate extrapolation in clinical and research settings based on the theoretical construct because performance on the BNT might reflect changes in ecological frequency of the test items, rather than performance across items of increasing difficulty. This study identifies the ecological frequency of BNT items at the time of publication using the American Heritage Word Frequency Book and determines changes in frequency over time based on the frequency distribution of BNT items across a current corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English.