Cross-Cultural Neuropsychology in Historical Perspective: Origins, Echoes, Challenges, and Future Directions

Clinical neuropsychology is cross-cultural “when there are significant cultural or language differences between the examiner, examinee, informants, tests, and/or social context” (Judd et al., 2009, p. 128). Clinical neuropsychology, therefore, has been cross-cultural from the earliest examples of cognitive and mental (IQ) testing in the early 20th century, with the translation of the Binet scales from French to English by the American psychologist H. H. Goddard and the administration of the translated battery (by non-Hispanic White psychologists, via oral interpreter) to European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. This chapter reviews that remote history; the earliest cultural neuropsychological research by A. R. Luria and colleagues in Uzbekistan, Central Asia, in the 1930s; and the more recent decades of “modern” cross-cultural neuropsychological research and practice, from the 1990s to 2018. Unfortunately, the field has most commonly downplayed or ignored the influences of culture and language on neurocognitive testing and clinical neuropsychological assessment in favor of a quantifiable, empiricist, and “universalist” view of brain-behavior relationships. This, in turn, has been problematic for the clinical assessment of rapidly increasing populations of ethnoculturally and linguistically diverse patients. A serious paucity remains of clinical neuropsychologists who are ethnoculturally and linguistically diverse and/or who possess the cross-cultural psychometric knowledge and linguistic fluency to evaluate such patients. Although there are reasons for optimism based in recent decades of research and clinical progress, the extent to which this health care specialty will remain viable and useful to increasingly large portions of US and world populations is uncertain.