Chapter 10 Neuropsychological Analyses of Surgical Skill

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a systematic study of nonverbal cognitive and motor abilities that identify important dimensions of variability among surgery residents and define precursors of superior technical ability. The four goals of the research program are: (1) to develop an effective criterion index of surgical performance; (2) to identify neuropsychologic measures of cognitive, perceptual, and motor skills related to operative technique but unrelated to measures of academic achievement; (3) to evaluate the relative importance of these abilities in accounting for variation among residents; and (4) to compare the efficiency of neuropsychological variables with academic indices in the prediction of surgical performance. A battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests to index five areas of nonverbal abilities, which might bear some relationship to operative skill including psychomotor abilities, perceptual abilities, perceptuomotor abilities, spatial memory, and stress tolerance. The results show that pure motor ability is not the critical factor in surgical proficiency. Rather, relatively innate, nonverbal, perceptually-based cognitions about complex spatial information appear to play a more central role in the operating room.