The Boston process approach  The Boston Process Approach is a neurological assessment tool developed by Edith Kaplan and her colleagues, Harold Goodglass, Nelson Butters, Laird Cermak, and Norman Geschwind at the Boston Veterans Medical Center. The main purpose of the Boston Process Approach is to assess brain damage as well as cognitive impairments in patients through a series of tests that are related to memory, attention, intelligence, and other aspects of information processing. This approach is one of the more flexible and qualitative neurological assessments because it emphasizes how a patient performs a task instead of whether they succeeded or failed at it. In order to start this procedure, the neuropsychologist first looks at the participant’s behaviors and what kind of complications they may have. Based on the given information, the person performs a standardized test. While the participant is performing the test, the neuropsychologist examines how they are answering each question. The neuropsychologist scrutinizes the process to see if there are any intellectual problems exhibited. Alterations can be made to the test by simply adding, or lessening the time the person has to complete the test. After using the Boston process approach, the clinician looks at the outcomes to make conclusions on what is going on in the brain. These conclusions are based on the errors that occurred during the test. The point of looking at the errors is to see what issues may have occurred when trying to process the information and answer the question in order to evaluate the specific deficit(s). Certain inaccuracies may infer that there’s damage to a definite part of the brain, like speech difficulties implicating the speech area in the left hemisphere. The qualitative analysis focuses on closely observing the process by which a patient arrives at a final answer. An example of qualitative analysis is in regard to the Block design test, which measures spatial visualization ability and motor skills. During the task the patient is asked to recreate a viewed pattern by arranging a set of blocks that have colored patterns on each side, The examiner observes the method by which the patient approaches and solves the problem, focusing, for example, on what quadrant the patient started at, which hand was used to arrange the blocks, whether the patient rotated the blocks on the table or had to lift them into space, if the image produced was either a mirror image or reversal of the pattern that the patient was supposed to create, and which side the patient made more errors on. This is considered qualitative analysis because it focuses on how the patient came to their final design, rather than the final design itself.