Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how a person's cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Professionals in this branch of psychology focus on how injuries or illnesses of the brain affect cognitive and behavioral functions.
Cognitive neuropsychology is a branch of cognitive psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. Cognitive psychology is the science that looks at how mental processes are responsible for the cognitive abilities to store and produce new memories, produce language, recognize people and objects, as well as our ability to reason and problem solve. Cognitive neuropsychology places a particular emphasis on studying the cognitive effects of brain injury or neurological illness with a view to inferring models of normal cognitive functioning. Evidence is based on case studies of individual brain damaged patients who show deficits in brain areas and from patients who exhibit double dissociations. Double dissociations involve two patients and two tasks. One patient is impaired at one task but normal on the other, while the other patient is normal on the first task and impaired on the other. For example, patient A would be poor at reading printed words while still being normal at understanding spoken words, while the patient B would be normal at understanding written words and be poor at understanding spoken words. Scientists can interpret this information to explain how there is a single cognitive module for word comprehension. From studies like these, researchers infer that different areas of the brain are highly specialised. Cognitive neuropsychology can be distinguished from cognitive neuroscience, which is also interested in brain-damaged patients, but is particularly focused on uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes.
Clinical neuropsychology is a sub-field of cognitive science and psychology concerned with the applied science of brain-behaviour relationships. Clinical neuropsychologists use this knowledge in the assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and or rehabilitation of patients across the lifespan with neurological, medical, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, as well as other cognitive and learning disorders. The branch of neuropsychology associated with children and young people is pediatric neuropsychology.
Brenda Milner is a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. As of 2020, she holds more than 25 honorary degrees and she continued to work in her nineties. Her current work covers many aspects of neuropsychology including her lifelong interest in the involvement of the temporal lobes in episodic memory. She is sometimes referred to as the founder of neuropsychology and has been essential in its development. She received the Balzan Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience in 2009, and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, together with John O'Keefe, and Marcus E. Raichle, in 2014. She turned 100 in July 2018 and at the time was still overseeing the work of researchers.
Jean-Martin Charcot was a famous French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. He worked on groundbreaking work about hypnosis and hysteria, in particular with his hysteria patient Louise Augustine Gleizes. Charcot is known as "the founder of modern neurology", and his name has been associated with at least 15 medical eponyms, including various conditions sometimes referred to as Charcot diseases.
Arthur Lester Benton was a neuropsychologist and Emeritus Professor of Neurology and Psychology at the University of Iowa.
Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital is a charitable hospital in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. It is part of the Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris and a teaching hospital of Sorbonne University.
Edith F. Kaplan was an American psychologist. She was a pioneer of neuropsychological tests and did most of her work at the Boston VA Hospital. Kaplan is known for her promotion of clinical neuropsychology as a specialty area in psychology. She examined brain-behavioral relationships in aphasia, apraxia, developmental issues in clinical neuropsychology, as well as normal and abnormal aging. Kaplan helped develop a new method of assessing brain function with neuropsychological assessment, called "The Boston Process Approach."
Norman Geschwind was a pioneering American behavioral neurologist, best known for his exploration of behavioral neurology through disconnection models based on lesion analysis.
Kenneth M. Heilman is an American behavioral neurologist He is considered one of the fathers of modern-day behavioral neurology.
Mark Solms is a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, who is known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming and his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience. He holds the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital and is the President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association. He is also Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Marc Jeannerod was a neurologist, a neurophysiologist and an internationally recognized expert in cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology. His research focuses on the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning motor control, motor cognition, the sense of agency, and more recently language and social cognition. Jeannerod's work bridges with elegance and rigor various levels of analysis, ranging from neuroscience to philosophy of mind, with clear implications for the understanding of a number of psychiatric and neurological disorders, especially schizophrenia.
The American Neuropsychiatric Association (ANPA) is a non-profit organization of professionals in neuropsychiatry, behavioral neurology and the clinical neurosciences, with over 700 members from around the world. Established in 1988, its mission is to improve the lives of people with disorders at the interface of psychiatry and neurology, with the vision of transforming recognition, understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. It founded in 1988 by two academic physicians doubly certified in neurology and psychiatry, Barry S. Fogel and Randolph Schiffer.
Yves Agid is a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, cell biologist, neurochemist, academician, university professor, hospital doctor, researcher in biology and scientist specializing in neurosciences.
Daniel H. Geschwind is the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics, Neurology and Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He also directs the UCLA Neurogenetics Program and the UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART), and holds the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair of Human Genetics there. Since March 1, 2016, he has served as the Senior Associate Dean and Associate Vice Chancellor for Precision Medicine at UCLA. His brother, Michael Geschwind, is also a professor of neurology, and behavioral neurology pioneer Norman Geschwind is his father's first cousin.
Pasquale Calabrese born 27 February 1961 in Naples, Italy, is an Italian professor of clinical neurosciences at the University of Basel, Faculty of Psychology, Department of Molecular and Cognitive Neurosciences. He is a neuroscientist, experimental neurologist and medical neuropsychologist.
Robert A. Stern is professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Anatomy & Neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine, where he is also director of clinical research for the BU Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center. From 2010 to 2019, he was the director of the Clinical Core of the BU Alzheimer's Disease Center.
Stein Andersson is a Norwegian psychologist, neuroscientist and Professor (Chair) of Clinical and Cognitive Neuropsychology at the University of Oslo, where he also heads the department of cognitive psychology and neuropsychology. He researches clinical and cognitive neuropsychology in patients with different somatic, neurological and neuropsychiatric and psychiatric disorders, including neurocognitive mechanisms in affective disorders.
Kevin William Walsh AO was an Australian pioneer of the profession of clinical neuropsychology.
