ABSTRACT
Subsequent Legal Precedent 271 New Directions 272 References 273
At the beginning of the 21st century, neuropsychological evaluation of the adult with a learning disability (LD) can now be guided by the results of research, much of which has been produced over the past 10 years. This is far cry from the “seat of the pants” approach to adult LD assessment, grounded in knowledge about LDs in children, which was the state of the field when I first became engaged in this work in the early 1990s. Interestingly, the evaluation of LDs and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults is the only area of neuropsychological assessment that has been guided by extrapolating from what we know about children. In other areas of neuropsychological assessment and research, including the effects of specific neurological disorders and neuropsychological test development, it has usually been the case that children have been treated as “little adults.” This assumption, of course, is almost always wrong and has been the source of much consternation to developmental neuropsychologists. However, there is now ample research on neurological disorders in children and burgeoning development of tests specifically for children.
