Cross-Validating the Executive Errors Scale of the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status

The Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) was developed to briefly measure a broad range of cognitive abilities, but it initially lacked a scale to evaluate executive functioning. Robert Spencer and colleagues recently created an Executive Errors scale (RBANS-EE) that quantified executive functioning (EF) errors committed during four RBANS subtests: List Learning, Semantic Fluency, Coding, and List Recall. In the present paper we cross-validated the RBANS-EE with a sample of 234 U.S. military veterans (M _AGE = 67.2, SD = 11.5 years; M _EDUCATION = 13.3, SD = 2.4 years) who completed the RBANS and various EF criterion measures as part of neuropsychological assessments they underwent during their clinical care. We found the RBANS-EE to be significantly correlated with most of the criterion EF measures. The RBANS-EE scale demonstrated modest ability to classify EF impairment at mild and severe levels; and, similarly, the RBANS-EE was modestly capable of accurately classifying those veteran respondents who were determined to have or to not have a neurocognitive disorder. Overall, the RBANS-EE can be quickly calculated, adds no administration time to an RBANS assessment, and yields useful scores to screen for EF dysfunction without replacing standalone EF tests.