The Method of “Object Exclusion”: Age Standards and Diagnostic Value for Neuropsychological Assessment of Children aged 4-17 years

The method of “Object Exclusion” is often used to assess a person’s ability to generalize and forms part of the pathopsychological and neuropsychological examination of children and adults. Nevertheless, there is no definite consensus as to which ratio of responses, which would reflect different generalization levels, is considered normative for children of different ages. Published data on the neuropsychological validity of this technique is quite inconsistent. The results of the investigation of 482 tentatively healthy children aged between 52 and 215 months (119 ± 43), of whom 316 were boys and 166 were girls, provided the standards of various categories of responses for different ages. Cross-analysis with neuropsychological diagnosis results revealed that the test performance indicators have to do with cognitive development, but the proportion of explained variance is no greater than 10%. Moreover, the neuropsychological validity of the method varies for each age group. Collating the responses from various categories allows predicting no more than 7% of neurocognitive development variability.