These explanations are from rather wordy neuropsychology assessments. It’s your job to explain what they mean to the patient and their family in whatever way is most helpful. You can use rewordings, examples, analogies or whatever you think helps. Be prepared for naïve but important questions. You may use the internet to help you!

1. Poor performance on the logical memory subtest of the WMS-III indicated significantly reduced episodic memory encoding

2. Rapid responding on a number of tests along with specific inhibitory difficulties found during executive testing indicated marked problems with cognitive inhibition

3. Although short-term memory for simple item lists was fine, working memory clearly declined as the cognitive load increased

4. Despite performing well on verbal reasoning tasks, visual-spatial reasoning was clearly a challenge on a number of non-verbal tasks

5. Although verbal recall was poor, verbal recognition was within the normal range potentially indicating an effect of difficulty or distraction which seemed to be more present during retrieval

6. As seen across a number of object drawing and matching tasks, spatial attention was clearly impaired especially for objects in the left visual field

7. While Mr Jones was motivated to apply himself fully to the assessment, sustained attention became poorer as the demands of the tasks increased

8. Verbal comprehension was a clear challenge throughout the assessment. However, as this was reflected both in the Vocabulary scale of the WAIS-IV and WTAR, it is likely that this was a pre-morbid problem

9. Although concentration was good and performance on non-timed tests was adequate, processing speed difficulties clearly impacted on performance in a number of domains

10. Although performance on the verbal fluency task was adequate, poor performance on both the category fluency and object naming tasks suggests a marked impairment of semantic memory