CONATION   [ back to Glossary Index ]
Conation is a term used by neuropsychologists to refer to the motivational component of voluntary actions, which links the capacities of the individual (such as IQ) with real world achievement. TBI is thought to impair conation. Consequently a person with a TBI who has substantially retained his pre-morbid IQ on formal testing may fail repeatedly in his work and home environment to complete tasks, for which his testing IQ render him fully capable of completing. The reason is that testing is given in a very structured way with lots of prompting in a distraction free environment; whereas, shopping at a grocery store or working through assignments alone at one's desk at the office, require the ability to self-start and push oneself through chosen tasks through to completion in settings which are crammed with distractions and have very little structure or prompts to help the person through a complex sequences actions.  In the past little if any effort was made to devise tests for conation which could be administered as part of a battery of other tests for things like attention, visual memory, verbal memory, etc. Very recently neuropsychologists Ralph Reitan and D. Wolfson have come up with a specific test format for assessing conation, which they plan to publish in later 1999 or early 2000. Once the format is described in the literature and made available to other neuropsychologists, we should know if the testing is valid and reliable. If so, this new test instrument would be an important advance.