The relationships among rehabilitation staff members' reports of cognitive dysfunction and neuropsychological assessment in an acute rehabilitation population.

Purpose/Objective: To examine the relationships among rehabilitation staff members' observations of the extent to which attention and memory functioning interfered with participants' rehabilitation progress and the relationship between these observations and neuropsychological testing. Research Method/Design: Participants were 39 adults admitted to a Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities-accredited, acute physical medicine rehabilitation unit who were referred for neuropsychological assessment. For study purposes, participants were administered the Mental Control subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale-Third Edition (D. Wechsler, 1997) and the Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (R. A. Stern & T. White, 2003). Occupational therapists, physical therapists, and nurses were asked to rate the extent to which participants' attention/concentration and memory interfered with their progress in rehabilitation. Results: Staff ratings of participants' attention or memory functioning interfering with rehabilitation progress were strongly and most closely related to their own ratings of the other cognitive domain. Objective attention and memory test performance were weakly and nonsignificantly correlated with each other. Relationships between staff observations and test data were also weak. Conclusions/Implications: Rehabilitation staff members may be viewing cognition as a unitary construct rather than identifying the independent contributions of different cognitive domains as they apply to rehabilitation performance and progress. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)