Executive Functioning and Verbal Memory test

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It is suspected by professionals that I have AS. I have no formal diagnoses.

Verbal Memory: Subject Score 58/Standard Score 118/Percentile 88/ Above X
Executive Functioning: Subject Score 35/Standard Score 76/Percentile 5/ Low X

I feel stupid for doing so poorly on the EF. It was....simple. Color or Shape. Geez.

Last edited by blackcat on 19 May 2011, 12:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

Oh, I meant that it shows that there may actually be some kind of modification for age going on if people close to my age can score that much higher than I did.

Also, there are more than three ways to think - Temple Grandin's model is a bit limited. I do fit, though - I'm pretty visual, although with the hyperlexia I tend to be good with words. It just takes work to produce them due to the need for translation and apparently my possibly awful verbal memory.



Interesting.

I know I've had more troubles since 2004ish, a lot more troubles. I felt like I was cognitively less capable of a lot of things, and creative writing became a lot more difficult (although I can still manage it). I find it really difficult to do something like transcribe from recordings or copy from books - I mean to the point that it'll often take me 2-3 attempts to remember a single string of words, and the number of words per string I can remember is fairly low.

I hadn't heard about stress-induced damage to the hippocampus. It does make sense that burnout could reflect neurological damage from pushing too hard. Other organs can get stressed and damaged, after all.

for me the words just blured together...I was only able to really recognize about 4-5 of them...of course those were the first 4-5 that were shown after that I could not keep up. I have severe deficits in short term memory, but once it does get into long term memory, it is there for good.
as for Executive functioning, I have been diagnosed with severe executive functioning dysfuction and profound ADD as well as PDD.

I remember one of my friends in grade school overheard my mom talking to his mom about my mental functioning scores, and he told me later. I am surprised you are not ret*d with all the problems you have.

Sometimes I wonder how I escaped that fate myself.

1% on both...

though i believe i have add and aspergers...

attempting diagnosis next week and following weeks probaly for aspergers or hfa

How old are you, out of curiosity? I mean, if you want to say. And do you still have your scores available?

nah lost the scores

21 years old

My full results, if anyone's interested.

Too lazy to cut out the blank space underneath now that it's posted. Oh well.

Last edited by MathGirl on 19 May 2011, 10:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That does sound familiar. At the worst point I'd have to look twice to dial a 7-digit phone number. That has gotten a bit better, though, come to think of it. And one of my last jobs was sorting mail, and I would keep forgetting what zip code I was scanning for, and then after re-rechecking, would forget which mailbag I'd left off on.

I was never great at creative writing, though I did like reading poetry when I was younger (not like I really read a lot of it, tho). I seemed to lose a feel for it (that is, getting strong impressions/feelings from it), but could never figure out if it was emotional numbness from stress or depression, or a cognitive issue. (Or a side effect of having to tune so much other stuff out all the time.) (Been getting little flashes of that coming back, too, but it's still rare and fragile.)

I used to memorize everyone's phone numbers. I didn't really need a phone book because I had it all in my head. This is so no longer the case. If I can't record it somewhere, I may as well not have it.

I'm slow... Verbal memory would have been a bit better if I hadn't messed up a little, and remember English is not my first language (I think it has no effect on the result). I tried to utilize picture-associations too.

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[img][800:724]http://i1178.photobucket.com/albums/x363/OJani/verbal-executive.jpg[/img]

I closed my test window already, or I'd just pic it...but..

Verbal 96 percentile
EF 75 percentile

I don't recall, nor did I really look at the stand scores. individual category percentile either...Or subject for that matter, however, my individual scores were; 15, 15, 15, 15 // 51, 0, 992.

I'm unclear how all correct on verbal nets a 96th percentile.

And I used a mental trick for the EF, preset the EF decision for either color or shape. Pick whichever is more comfortable/immediate. Insert pause for confirmation of protecal (desired response). Ie Set your reflex response to color, for example, and set attention to the promting condition of color or shape. If color (for this example) allow for immediate reflexive reply, if not solve for shape. This got me quick responses to the promting for matching colors, and slower replies to matching of shapes, yet accurate, and on average....average speed.

It was fun, I spose. But highly illogical in the presumtions it makes. The verbal portion was not...um, verbal. I would have failed it miserably if I had to remember spoken words. Not to mention the delay is very very brief. And the EF portion does not contain shifting rules or varied conditions really, it's rule set is given to you before you even begin.

And ... the Silk Stalking on the Lamb with a Nest on it's back standing next to a Parent cooking a Turkey with a Face and a Hand the Color of Weather raining Nails on the Shield of a Mouse in a House on a Hill. It's a really bizarre mental image, but yes...."word to image" convertion is natural and instant. So it was easy to recognize a word, I've either seen it in this image or it's unfamiliar to this image. I think in non-language based thoughts and images, not words. Thinking in words is mentally taxing, but doable....not natural, and inefficient.

Almost identical to mine.

I'm not smarter than the Brain Center of Florida, but the first thing that comes up is lists of 15 words. Short-term memory is 4-7 items, so this seems like anyone would struggle. It's also very strange with stuff flashing on the screen like a video game. I'd be slow with this just because I've never done anything like it before.

The Match Shape thing doesn't work - it flashes "Press the Left Arrow Key" like it's having an epileptic seizure, but I press the key and nothing happens. I think they're too fancy for their own good with this one.

I can't get beyond the arrow key issue, so this is a total fail.

Verbal Memory: 66th percentile
Executive Functioning: 77th percentile

I think you have a point here. In case I can't build a picture, a concept, or at least an association to a word quickly, I fail miserably. A good long time verbal memory would require to preserve random words, phrases. I know I'm not doing this well. I seem to have similar difficulties with names, faces.

It might be interesting for foreign language learners, that as far as simple words are used in the test, it may have the opposite effect on the result to what would be expected at first sight. Simply because the mind is set on better focus naturally when interpreting a non-native language.

58th percentile on the verbal memory test and 8th percentile on executive functioning. This is not surprising as I often get "tunnel vision" focusing on a task and have difficulty refocusing on something else. I often get irritated when I get interrupted at an important point. Sometimes if I'm near the end of a task and get interrupted I forget to finish the first task and move on to something else. This has caused all sorts of difficulties with the working world as there are few jobs that require minimal social interaction and involve concentrating on a single task for long periods of time. Further, I found myself getting very irritated and having to sort of restart my thinking because I got confused and just couldn't process for a second or two till I slowed down and reread the rule, sort of like I had to clear everything out of my mind and look at the question again as a new question.

I was a bit surprised by the verbal memory score. I used to do better at tests like this. It's probably partly due to the fact that these were just words with no context or meaning, so I'm basically just memorizing patterns of letters on a screen. To me, it wouldn't matter particularly that it's a word or not. You could put patterns of letters in random locations on the screen, upside down, w/e, and my result would be similar. I memorize pictures not words. The memory tests I took as a child always included some definition or sentence with the word. The more detail and depth there is to something, and the more relevant and interesting the information the easier it is to memorize. This measures what I like to call "pure" memory, whereas most of my memory is now more based on keeping track of things that are actually useful to me, so perhaps with age we direct our pure talents into more specialized functions.