Twenty years of cognitive assessment: current status and future directions

This commentary examines a number of methodological and conceptual issues that were raised in this special section on cognitive assessment. Although progress has been made in a number of areas since cognitive-clinical researchers first addressed the assessment of cognition almost 20 years ago, important conceptual and methodological questions still remain unresolved. These include questions about the validity of retrospective self-report questionnaires of cognition, the low convergent validity between different assessment methods, and the failure to specify the range of generalizability of specific cognition measures. Further advances in cognitive assessment will depend on a more concerted research focus on the methodological and conceptual issues raised in this special section.