Cognitive Neuropsychology

This book gives equal weight to the psychological and neurological approaches to the study of cognitive deficits in patients with brain lesions. The result is an analysis of cognitive skills and abilities that departs from the more usual syndrome approach.

An extended version of the first edition, this book includes a set of research review papers which supplement the contents of each chapter by providing a discussion of current research issues and detailed investigations of individual cases.

Cognitive neuropsychology has now established a major place in the teaching of undergraduate psychology degrees and is an important topic of postgraduate research. The subject is also of increasing interest to clinicians because of its links with devising remediation procedures for people with brain injury. Explorations in Cognitive Neuropsychology is the first major text to appear on this topic since the late 1980s and thus introduces the reader to a vast amount of research previously unavailable in textbook format. The book is written in a lively and engaging style which nonetheless enables the reader to get a scholarly, in-depth overview of this important field. The coverage of topics is very broad-ranging. It begins with an overview of the subject including issues such as research strategy and advances in neuroimaging. Following this are chapters on blindsight, agnosia, facial processing impairments, and the rapidly growing area of neglect. The next chapter is devoted to studies of the split brain. Two chapters then cover the enormous developments in devising functional architectures of the language system from the observation of discrete language impairments. Various aspects of memory impairments are then discussed and the book ends with a consideration of frontal lobe functions. At various points the book also covers the contribution of connectionist modelling to cognitive neuropsychology.

Déjà vu is one of the most complex and subjective of all memory phenomena. It is an infrequent and striking mental experience, where the feeling of familiarity is combined with the knowledge that this feeling is false. While until recently it was an aspect of memory largely overlooked by mainstream cognitive psychology, this book brings together the growing scientific literature on déjà vu, making the case for it as a metacognitive phenomenon. The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Déjà Vu reviews clinical, experimental and neuroimaging methods, focusing on how memory disorders and neurological dysfunction relate to the experience. Examining déjà vu as a memory phenomenon, Chris Moulin explores how the experience of déjà vu in special populations, such as healthy aging or those with schizophrenia, provides new insights into understanding this phenomenon. He considers the extensive data on déjà vu in people with epilepsy, dementia and other neurological conditions, assessing neuropsychological theories of déjà vu formation. Essential reading for all students and researchers interested in memory disorders, this valuable book presents the case for déjà vu as a ‘healthy’ phenomenon only experienced by people with sufficient cognitive resources to oppose and detect the false feeling of familiarity.

This volume is the outcome of the first two editions of the European Workshops on Cognitive Neuropsychology. The aim of the workshops was to promote a discussion in which opposite views or mutually integrating positions could be debated.

How independent are different cognitive skills during development? Is the modularity seen in the studies of adult neuropsychology disorders mirrored by modularity in development? Are developmental neuropsychological disorders explicable against cognitive models? What restrictions are there to developmental plasticity? How many routes are there to competence? Is there a single developmental pathway? What do disorders of cognitive development tell us about normal developmental processes? These are some of the questions addressed by this text. In certain cognitive domains, such as the analysis of reading and spelling disorders, the field is well developed, with extensive studies of the development of dyslexias and dysgraphias. In other areas, such as the analysis of perceptual spatial disorders, pertinant studies are beginning, as in the analysis of developmental face recognition disorders, and the exploration of spatial disorders of Williams' syndrome. In these areas, interesting routes for future inquiry are also evident. The text of this book is organized around seven key cognitive areas, within which the developmental disorders are addressed in turn: language, memory, perception, reading, spelling, arithmetic and executive skills. The first three of this list may be considered the core areas of cognition; the second three involve specific cultural transmission in their acquisition; and the third, concerns higher order processes. The major emphasis of the text is upon developmental rather than acquired disorders. Throughout, case studies are used to convey an impression of the cases themselves, and to illustrate how dissociations in performance are displayed.

The goal of this book is to introduce cognitive neuropsychology to a broad audience of clinicians and researchers. To orient readers who are interested in disorders of higher cortical function, but have little background in psychology, sufficient introductory material is provided, and yet each topic is explored in enough depth to serve as a reference for cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuropsychologists. The editor, David Margolin, M.D., Ph.D., has assembled a prominent group of researchers and clinicians, and each describes how the vocabulary, theoretical framework, and information-processing models of cognitive psychology are applied to various disorders of higher cortical function. Each chapter provides an overview of the disorder being discussed, develops a rationale for selecting the stimulus materials, and demonstrates how a given patient's deficits can be understood in terms of a breakdown in one or more cognitive domains. The contributors gear the chapters toward the practicing clinicians and use a step-by-step description of how one goes about determining the locus of the deficit in a patient. This cognitive neuropsychological approach is applied to disorders of attention, memory, language, vision, calculation, and motor control. A final chapter introduces the important role of neuroimaging techniques in diagnosis, which will continue to aid our understanding of brain-behavior relationships. Professionals in the fields of neuropsychology, neurology, clinical psychology, psychiatry, as well as practicing speech therapists and pathologists, will find this volume a comprehensive introduction to this increasingly important discipline.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.