Neuropsychological functions and reading competence in medical students

Abstract

Introduction. Medical students require a high capacity for comprehension; therefore, one of the main competencies required by these students during their training is reading comprehension, which allows them to obtain and adequately process the necessary information that corresponds to the progress of their training. Deficiency in this reading competence limits learning and causes them to resort to short-term rote learning, limiting its use in the future. Objective. To describe the behavior of neuropsychological functions and reading competence of medical students. Methods. Documentary, descriptive, quantitative, retrospective and cross-sectional study of a database with the results of the neuropsychological evaluation with NEUROPSI Brief in Spanish, applied to medical students. Results. Moderate and severe impairments were observed in up to 41% of the analyzed sample showing impairment in recall memory, attention and concentration and encoding. Conclusion. In the sample studied, the neuropsychological variables affected contribute to impair inferential reading comprehension, which demonstrates the need to provide attention to university students in order to improve mental functioning for learning.