by Robert A. Stern, PhD, and Travis White, PhD
Purpose: Assesses a wide range of cognitive skills and functions
Age: 18 years to 97 years
Admin: Individual
Time: 45 minutes
Format: Paper and pencil, Download
Qualification Level: A
The NAB is a comprehensive and conormed assessment that offers the combined strengths of both a flexible and fixed battery to allow clinicians to focus on specific areas of concern.
Features and benefits
- The NAB may be purchased by individual module kits versus packaged as a complete battery. Certain NAB tests are available for stand-alone purchase as well.
- Each of the 33 NAB tests has two equivalent, parallel forms that were created and normed simultaneously to facilitate reevaluation while avoiding practice effects.
- Each of the five domain-specific NAB Modules includes a Daily Living test designed to be multifactorial in nature and related to real-world tasks of everyday living in order to evaluate constructs such as auditory and reading comprehension, simple calculations, problem-solving, and decisional capacity. The new NAB Daily Living test combines these five tests into one easy-to-use form.
Test structure
The NAB consists of five domain-specific modules: Attention, Language, Memory, Spatial, and Executive Functions. A sixth module, Screening, allows the clinician to determine which of the other five domain-specific modules are appropriate to administer to an individual patient. Each of the six NAB modules is self-contained and may be administered independently of the other modules.
- The Attention Module provides a marker of an individual’s attentional capacity, working memory, psychomotor speed, selective attention, divided attention, and information processing speed.
- The Language Module provides a marker of the severity of aphasia and related disorders of language production, comprehension, and word-finding.
- The Spatial Module provides a marker of the examinee’s visuoperceptual skills, attention to visual detail, visuoconstruction, right-left orientation, topographical orientation, and visual scanning.
- The Memory Module provides a marker of an individual’s verbal explicit learning, visual explicit learning, verbal delayed free recall, visual delayed recognition memory, and verbal explicit learning and recognition of information likely to be encountered in day-to-day living. A stand-alone Memory Module Professional Manual and Scoring Program and special combination kits are available.
- The Executive Functions Module provides a marker of planning, engaging with others effectively, problem solving, successfully interacting with the environment to get one’s needs met, judgment, conceptualization, cognitive response set, mental flexibility, verbal fluency, and generativity.
- The Screening Module streamlines the assessment process by providing scores that quickly let you know whether further assessment should be conducted. It also helps to generate initial hypotheses regarding differential diagnosis and treatment recommendations and provides an estimate of the examinee’s functioning in a particular domain when more in-depth examination is either not warranted or not possible.
Technical information
- All NAB tests were standardized on the same sample of more than 1,400 healthy adults.
- Interrater reliability studies conducted on those NAB tests that require more subjective scoring indicated excellent agreement. A 6-month test-retest study (n = 95) resulted in very good temporal stability and provides important practice effect information. The reliability estimates for the NAB Index scores are excellent (e.g., Total NAB Index score r = .96).
- Extensive validation evidence has been established through both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, criterion validity investigations, and several clinical validation studies. Additional validity studies included a comparison of the NAB with measures of functional independence in an inpatient rehabilitation hospital and an investigation involving a group of simulated malingerers who received the NAB, along with several existing measures of symptom validity.
Supplemental components
- The NAB-SP calculates normative scores and generates profiles quickly and easily. The program enables you to overlay profiles from prior administrations and allows reports to be exported to common word processing, spreadsheet, and database programs for editing.
- The NAB Video Training Program, available on the PAR Training Portal, is designed to facilitate correct administration and scoring procedures for the NAB. Each chapter includes an overview of the specific test followed by a demonstration of a standard administration.
Note: If you are purchasing a NAB module kit—with the exception of the Screening Module—we strongly recommend that you also purchase the NAB Administration, Scoring, and Interpretation Manual (Item 5088–TM) and the NAB Demographically Corrected Norms Manual (Item 5091–TM). All kits include the NAB-SP.
"...the NAB is generally comparable to traditional language and visuospatial measures, and it sufficiently detects attention and executive deficits."
—Pulsipher, D.T., Stricker, N.H., Sadek, J.R., & Haaland, K.Y. (2013). Clinical utility of the Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (NAB) after unilateral stroke. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 27, 924-945.
A comprehensive list of research articles related to the NAB is available via Mendeley, a free reference management tool. After accessing the link, you will be prompted to create an account. A white paper describing how to use this research repository can be found here. Use of this resource is encouraged to facilitate research using NAB products. Both the list and the white paper are available in the Resources tab above