What Information Do Neuropsychologists Use to Guide their Clinical Decisions? A Survey on Knowledge and Application of Evidence-Based Practice in a French-Speaking Population.

OBJECTIVE: Evidence-based practice (EBP) is an approach that encourages clinicians to base their practice on evidence to improve the quality of patient care and reduce uncertainty in their clinical decisions. However, the state of knowledge and practice of neuropsychologists in French-speaking countries is still unknown. This study aimed to find out what these neuropsychologists know about EBP and whether they use it. METHOD: A questionnaire with 39 questions for French-speaking neuropsychologists was distributed. The questions focused on neuropsychologists' knowledge and use of EBP and information that guide their clinical decisions. RESULTS: A total of 392 respondents started the survey. The data show that only 35% correctly defined EBP and there was confusion between this practice and the strict use of research data. In practice, their decisions are influenced by multiple factors, including the patient's difficulties and advice from peers. Regarding the research, a significant proportion of the sample stated that they did not search the scientific literature frequently. Barriers to accessing scientific information and ineffective article-reading behavior were highlighted. CONCLUSION: A lack of knowledge of EBP among French-speaking neuropsychologists was observed. Furthermore, the factors influencing their decision-making do not clearly fit the definitions of EBP. Information-seeking behaviors show several weaknesses and barriers to the integration of scientific evidence into practice. These results are like those of other studies conducted among psychologists or in other health professions. We will discuss possible courses of action that could be implemented to improve the knowledge and use of EBP.

Preschoolers' memory recall of new information: relation to parental reminiscing.

The influence of parental reminiscing style (the way parents discuss past events with their children) on the development of children's autobiographical memory has been well documented. The specific mechanisms involved in this effect, however, remain unknown. We explored the association between specific components of parental reminiscing and preschoolers' episodic memory. Fifty-three parent-child dyads (MChild Age = 53.13 months, 29 females) from Belgium were tested twice within a delay of about nine months. At the first time point, parental reminiscing style was assessed via a parent-child discussion of a prior standardised event (a museum visit) focusing on both the structure of parental interactions and the addressed content. At each time point, children were administered with story-recall tasks in the form of true-false recognition about previously heard stories. Generalised linear mixed-effect models were conducted on an item-by-item basis. Results indicated that parental reminiscing is associated with preschoolers' recognition memory performance at both time points, but not all reminiscing components equally influence children's performance. Specifically, parents' concretisations and metamemory talk were found to impact children's memory. The identification of these components provided insights for exploring the processes underlying the reminiscing-memory influence (in-depth encoding of information, binding processes, and metacognition).