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BORB Birmingham Object Recognition Battery: An Overview of Its Development, Structure, and Applicati



BORB provides a set of standardised procedures for assessing neuropsychological disorders of visual object recognition, based on tests developed in the cognitive neuropsychological literature. The tests are introduced in terms of cognitive neuropsychological analyses of object recognition, and guidance is given concerning test use and interpretation. The tests assess low-level aspects of visual perception (using same-different matching of basic perceptual features, such as orientation, length, position and object size), intermediate visual processes (e.g., matching objects different in viewpoint), access to stored perceptual knowledge about objects (object decision), access to semantic knowledge (function and associative matches) and access to names from object (picture naming). BORB will serve as an invaluable companion test battery to the PALPA test of language ability.


The Birmingham Object Recognition Battery (BORB) is a theoretically based test battery that is used in adult cognitive neuropsychology in research and for clinical assessment. It allows a detailed analysis of underlying impairments in individuals with brain injury who have visual object recognition difficulties. The BORB's usefulness in pediatrics is supported by numerous research studies. However, there is no published normative data for children, making clinical use of the test difficult. The aim of this brief report is to publish some preliminary normative data in 70 children aged between 3 and 8 years to assist both researchers and clinicians with interpretation of test scores. Results indicate that children's performance on individual BORB subtests varies according to task demands and age. For some subtests there is improvement in performance with increasing age. However, very young children (age 3-4 years) perform at adult levels on some subtests, or alternatively on other subtests they perform at the level of chance. The current paper supports the need for pediatric data for the BORB due to large normal individual variation in performance and varying age-related performance on individual BORB subtests.




BORB Birmingham Object Recognition Battery




Object decision (OD) test is one subtest of the Birmingham Object Recognition Battery (BORB). It is useful for differential diagnosis among several neurodegenerative diseases. However, normative data provided with this battery count on very few subjects and do not control for the effect of age, which limits interpretability. The purpose of Study 1 was to provide normative data for the OD test of the BORB (version A-hard). The objectives of Study 2 were to establish the diagnostic validity of this task and predictive validity of the normative data in the case of the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and Alzheimer's disease (AD).Based on multiple linear regressions, equations to calculate Z-scores corrected for age were provided for 130 participants aged from 47 to 89 years. Performance of 20 healthy participants was compared to that of 14 individuals with svPPA and 18 with AD. After controlling for confounders, participants with svPPA had a lower total score than controls and AD participants. AD participants had a poorer performance than controls only when chimeric objects were considered. Among those with a deficit on the total score of the test, 94% (17/18, including 12 with svPPA) were correctly identified as having a pathological condition (svPPA or AD). This test could help refine differential diagnosis between svPPA and AD patients, especially before the deficits of episodic memory show up.


Visual agnosia is a neurological deficit that results in impairments in the perception and recognition of complex visual stimuli such as common objects or faces, while low-level visual processes and the memory systems remain intact. The primary cause of these deficits is damage in the lateral part of the occipital lobes, and/or in the ventral portion of the temporal lobes.


BORB provides a set of standardised procedures for assessing neuropsychological disorders of visual object recognition, based on tests developed in the cognitive neuropsychological literature. The tests are introduced in terms of cognitive neuropsychological analyses of object recognition, and guidance is given concerning test use and interpretation. The tests assess low-level aspects of visual perception (using same-different matching of basic perceptual features, such as orientation, length, position and object size), intermediate visual processes (e.g., matching objects different in viewpoint), access to stored perceptual knowledge about objects (object decision), access to semantic knowledge (function and associative matches) and access to names from object (picture naming). BORB will serve as an invaluable companion test battery to the PALPA test of language ability. 2ff7e9595c


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