Comparative Neuropsychology And Brain Imaging

This volume is a special commemorative publication in honor of Professor Dr. Ulrike Halsband, from the University of Freiburg in Germany, on the occasion of her 60th birthday, and includes chapters specially written for the volume, with recent views, reviews and results on such fields as functioneuroanatomytomy, neuropsychology, education, animal behavior, altered states of consciousness, hypnosis and the history of psychology in Germany. The contributors are internationally well-known scholars from academic and clinical institutions abroad in Europe. --

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Rapid developments in brain neuroimaging methods have occurred over the past decade. These advances have revolutionized cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and are likely to have major influence on clinical psychological, psychiatric, and neurological practice over the coming years. There are a number of excellent books that focus on specific neuroimaging methods, such as fMRI. Furthermore, cognitive and neuroscience texts have increasingly incorporated functional brain neuroimaging. Yet, there are few books to date that consider and review emerging research in the application of brain neuroimaging methods for the study and assessment of behavioral and cognitive disorders. This book provides a broad coverage of current research trends in the clinical application of brain neuroimaging methods in the context of behavioral medicine, neuropsychology, and related areas of medical psychology. It uniquely integrates current neuroimaging methods and studies with current behavioral medicine research, and presents knowledge derived from recent developments in the fields of functional and structural brain imaging. By integrating information from experimental behavioral medicine with clinical insights, this book will serve as a source book for neuropsychologists, psychologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, and other professionals in both clinical practice and academic context. This integration results in the reader having a greater understanding of how the brain controls behavior, the disturbances of behavior that may occur with different disorders, and what clinicians should consider when assessing or working with patients with behavioral problems.

Over the past two decades researchers and clinicians in the neurosciences have witnessed a literal information explosion in the area of brain imaging and neuropsychological functioning. Until recently we could not view the nervous system except through the use of invasive procedures. Today, a variety of imaging techniques are available, but this technology has advanced so rapidly that it has been difficult for new information to be consolidated into a single source. The goal of this volume is to present information on technological advances along with current standards and techniques in the area of brain imaging and neuropsychological functioning. The quality of brain imaging techniques has improved dramatically. In 1975 one had to be content with a brain image that only offered a gross distinction between ventricular cavities, brain, and bone tissue. Current imaging techniques offer considerable precision and approximate gross neuroanatomy to such an extent that differentiation between brain nuclei, pathways, and white gray matter is possible. These technological advances have progressed so rapidly that basic and clinical research have lagged behind. It is not uncommon, particularly in longitudinal research, for the technical meth odology of a study to become obsolete while that study is still in progress. This has hampered certain aspects of systematic research and has also produced the need for a textbook that could address contemporary issues in brain imaging and neuropsychology.

In the past 25 years, the frontal lobes have dominated human neuroscience research. Functional neuroimaging studies have revealed their importance to brain networks involved in nearly every aspect of mental and cognitive functioning. Studies of patients with focal brain lesions have expanded on early case study evidence of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive changes associated with frontal lobe brain damage. The role of frontal lobe function and dysfunction in human development (in both children and older adults), psychiatric disorders, the dementias, and other brain diseases has also received rapidly increasing attention. In this useful text, 14 leading frontal lobe researchers review and synthesize the current state of knowledge on frontal lobe function, including structural and functional brain imaging, brain network analysis, aging and dementia, traumatic brain injury, rehabilitation, attention, memory, and consciousness. The book therefore provides a state-of-the-art account of research in this exciting area, and also highlights a number of new findings by some of the world's top researchers.

This generously illustrated guide to functional imaging responds to the needs of non-specialists, professionals and students of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, behavioral neurology, and epistemology. It enables them to understand the basic principles of the highly specialized and constantly evolving imaging technologies and to assess for themselves the contribution of these technologies to their respective fields. Fundamentals of Functional Brain Imaging will be useful for practitioners and advanced students in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology, residents in psychiatry and neurology, as well as the interested general public.

The present volume aims at presenting a selection of new methods and techniques that may have value for clinical neuropsychology. There is an increasing interest among clinical neuropsychologists regarding new developments in cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology. This book presents an updated view of recent methodological developments in experimental psychology and clinical neuroscience.

Category-specific knowledge disorders are among the most intriguing and perplexing syndromes in cognitive neuropsychology. The past decade has witnessed increased interest in these disorders, due largely to a heightened appreciation of the profound implications that an understanding of concept representation has for such diverse topics as object recognition, the organisation of the lexicon, and storage of long-term memories. Until recently, information about the representation of concepts was limited to findings from patients with brain injury and disease. This state of affairs has now changed with the advent and wide-spread availability of functional imaging for studying cognition in the normal human brain. The purpose of this special issue is to provide a forum for new findings and critical, theoretical analyses of existing data from patient and functional brain imaging studies. The contributions, all from major investigators in the field, range from studies of specific object categories such as animals, tools, fruit and vegetables, and faces, to the more general domains of number processing, social interaction, and mechanical knowledge. A unifying theme of these papers is the extent to which the findings can be best understood within the context of models that posit an innate, domain-specific organisation, those that appeal to an organisation by sensory- and motor-based features and properties, and those that propose an undifferentiated, distributed neural organisation.