neuropsychology - Approaches

The study of psychological phenomena in the light of what is known about brain organization and function. Neuropsychologists are often concerned with patients suffering from brain damage. The aim of their work is to identify these patients' disabilities, discover methods of rehabilitation, and use this information to make inferences about the functioning of the normal mind and brain.

Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology and neurology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relate to specific psychological processes.

It is scientific in its approach and shares an information processing view of the mind with cognitive psychology and cognitive science.

In practice neuropsychologists tend to work in academia (involved in basic or clinical research), clinical settings (involved in assessing or treating patients with neuropsychological problems - see clinical neuropsychology), forensic settings (often assessing people for legal reasons or court cases or working with offenders, or appearing in court as expert witness) or industry (often as consultants where neuropsychological knowledge is applied to product design or in the management of pharmaceutical clinical-trials research for drugs that might have a potential impact on CNS functioning).

Approaches

Experimental neuropsychology is an approach which uses methods from experimental psychology to uncover the relationship between the nervous system and cognitive function. Human work in this area often takes advantage of specific features of our nervous system (for example that visual information presented to a specific visual field is preferentially processed by the cortical hemisphere on the opposite side) to make links between neuroanatomy and psychological function.

Clinical neuropsychology is the application of neuropsychological knowledge to the assessment (see neuropsychological test and neuropsychological assessment), management and rehabilitation of people who have suffered illness or injury (particularly to the brain) which has caused neurocognitive problems.

Cognitive neuropsychology is a relatively new development and has emerged as a distillation of the complementary approaches of both experimental and clinical neuropsychology. It seeks to understand the mind and brain by studying people who have suffered brain injury or neurological illness. This is based on the principle that if a specific cognitive problem can be found after an injury to a specific area of the brain, it is possible that this part of the brain is in some way involved. A more recent but related approach is cognitive neuropsychiatry which seeks to understand the normal function of mind and brain by studying psychiatric or mental illness.

Connectionism is the use of artificial neural networks to model specific cognitive processes using what are considered to be simplified but plausible models of how neurons operate. Once trained to perform a specific cognitive task these networks are often damaged or 'lesioned' to simulate brain injury or impairment in an attempt to understand and compare the results to the effects of brain injury in humans.

Functional neuroimaging uses specific neuroimaging technologies to take readings from the brain, usually when a person is doing a particular task, in an attempt to understand how the activation of particular brain areas is related to the task. The use of brain scans to investigate the structure or function of the brain is common, either as simply a way of better assessing brain injury with high resolution pictures, or by examining the relative activations of different brain areas. The use of designed experimental tasks, often controlled by computer and typically measuring reaction time and accuracy on a particular tasks thought to be related to a specific neurocognitive process. Psychology

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Historically important writers	B.F. Skinner · Jean Piaget · Sigmund Freud · Albert Bandura · Leon Festinger · Carl Rogers · Stanley Schachter · Neal E. Miller · Edward Thorndike · Abraham Maslow · Gordon Allport · Erik Erikson · Hans Eysenck · William James · David McClelland · Raymond Cattell · John B. Watson · Kurt Lewin · Donald O. Hebb · George A. Miller · Clark L. Hull · Jerome Kagan · Carl Jung · Ivan Pavlov