Discussion: neuropsychology informs

Discussion: neuropsychology informs essay assignment

Discussion: neuropsychology informs essay assignment

Assignment: How neuropsychology informs our understanding of developmental disorders

Discussion post of one to two paragraphs.

The field of cognitive neuroscience includes a wide array of disciplines and professions, such as the research neuroscientist who focuses on non-human primate translational work or the clinical neuropsychologist who conducts assessment with patients at a medical center. How do you see cognitive neuroscience benefiting the field of psychology, the patients who seek mental health services, and society at large? How do you think cognitive neuroscience could affect primary and secondary education of children and adolescents? What historical developments in neuroscience have had the greatest effect on the larger field of psychology? Provide examples to support your thinking.

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How neuropsychology informs our understanding of developmental disorders

Bruce F. Pennington University of Denver, USA

This review includes 1) an explanation of what neuropsychology is, 2) a brief history of how develop- mental cognitive neuroscience emerged from earlier neuropsychological approaches to understanding atypical development, 3) three recent examples that illustrate the benefits of this approach, 4) issues and challenges this approach must face, and 5) a forecast for the future of this approach. Keywords: Developmental cognitive neuroscience, plasticity, molecular genetics, neural network models, dyslexia, neuropsychology.

This paper will present neuropsychology as a method for understanding childhood disorders. Very simply put, neuropsychology is the study of brain–behavior relations, and developmental neuropsychology is the study of how those relations develop in both typical and atypical cases. More recently, with advances in neural network models, neuroimaging, and genetics, a field of developmental cognitive neuroscience has emerged that tests links across several levels of analysis: etiology, brain development, neuropsychology, and behavioral symptoms. So, I will argue that neuropsychology provides an important bridge across these levels and thus among the other methods described in other articles in this Annual Research Review. As it interacts with these other methods, neuropsychology itself is being transformed, and will eventually merge into the wider inter- discipline of developmental cognitive neuroscience.

This review includes 1) an explanation of what neuropsychology is, 2) a brief history of how developmental cognitive neuroscience emerged from earlier neuropsychological approaches to under- standing atypical development, 3) three recent examples that illustrate the benefits of this approach, 4) issues and challenges this approach must face, and 5) a forecast for the future of this approach.

What is neuropsychology?

Since the traditional role of neuropsychology has mainly been to understand the behavioral effects of acquired lesions in adults, it has always been a clinical science that has attempted to explain behavioral symptoms in terms of theories of normal brain function. So neuropsychology illustrates well the reciprocal relation that exists between basic and clinical science. We cannot understand clinical phenomena without a theory of normal function, but clinical phenomena sometimes force revisions in our theories of normal function. The history of neuro-

psychology provides many noteworthy examples of both parts of this dialectic: how basic cognitive theory has been revised in response to unexpected clinical data and how advances in basic cognitive theory have changed the constructs and measures clinical neuropsychologists use to understand patients. Patient data have led to theoretical revisions in virtually every domain of cognition: vision, attention, long-term memory, short-term memory, language, and reading (McCarthy & Warrington, 1990; Shallice, 1988; Squire, 1987). In each case, the observation of a surprising set of symptoms in a patient leads to much more detailed experimental investigations, and then to revisions of basic theory. Modern cognitive science would surely be quite different without the data provided by patients with acquired lesions, yet modern neuropsychology would not exist without modern cognitive science. For instance, contemporary clinical neuropsychologists, unlike those of a few decades ago, think in terms of interacting neural systems and are much more cognizant of the brain’s plasticity in the face of damage.

More recently, the application of neuropsychology to adult and child psychopathology has expanded the scope of neuropsychological theory to include domains like affective decision-making, inhibition, social cognition, imitation, emotion regulation, source-monitoring of thoughts and actions, and even the self. So there is no sharp line between neuro- psychological and psychological explanations of behavior. Neuropsychology just adds the additional requirement that we try to understand psychological processes in terms of how the brain works. Hence, neuropsychologists mainly use behavioral measures in their work, but they often relate such measures to measures of brain structure or function, or even to genetic measures.

So neuropsychology, like the rest of science, is solidly committed to materialism – behavioral phenomena result from complex physical interactions in the brain – but not necessarily to reductive materialism.