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.
History
Cognitive neuropsychology has its roots in the diagram-making approach to language disorder that started in the second half of the 19th century. The discovery that aphasia takes different forms depending on the location of brain damage provided a powerful framework for understanding brain function.
In 1861, Paul Broca reported a post mortem study of an aphasic patient who was speechless apart from a single nonsense word: "Tan". Broca showed that an area of the left frontal lobe was damaged. As Tan was unable to produce speech but could still understand it, Broca argued that this area might be specialised for speech production and that language skills might be localized to this cortical area. Broca did a similar study on another patient, Lelong, a few weeks later. Lelong, like Tan, could understand speech but could only repeat the same five words. After examining his brain, Broca noticed that Lelong had a lesion in approximately the same area as his patient Tan. He also noticed that in the more than 25 patients he examined with aphasia, they all had lesions to the left frontal lobe but there was no damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. From this he concluded that the function of speech was probably localized in the inferior frontal gyrus of the left hemisphere of the brain, an area now known as Broca's area.
Karl Wernicke subsequently reported patients with damage further back in the temporal lobe who could speak but were unable to understand what was said to them, providing evidence for two potentially interconnected language centres. These clinical descriptions were integrated into a theory of language organisation by Lichtheim. Subsequently, these models were used and developed to inform Dejerine's account of reading, Liepmann's theory of action and Lissauer's 1890 account of object recognition and Lewandowsky and Stadelmann's 1908 account of calculation.
However, the early 20th century saw a reaction to the overly-precise accounts of the diagram-making neurologists. Pierre Marie challenged conclusions against previous evidence of Broca's areas in 1906 and Henry Head attacked the whole field of cerebral localisation 1926.