Practicing neuropsychologists and students in clinical neuropsychology
must increas- ingly cross disciplinary boundaries to understand and
appreciate the neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, and
neuropharmacological bases of cognition and behavior, cur- rent
cognitive theory in many different domains of functioning, and the
nature and tools of clinical assessment. Although the cognitive
functions and abilities of interest are often the same, each of these
fields has grappled with them from sometimes very different
perspectives. Terminology is often specific to a particular discipline
or ap- proach, methods are diverse, and the goals or outcomes of study
or investigation are usually very different. This book poises itself to
provide a largely missing link between traditional approaches to
assessment and the growing area of cognitive neuropsy- chology.
Historically, neuropsychology had as its central core the consideration
of evidence from clinical cases. It was the early work of neurologists
such as Broca, Wernicke, Hughlings-Jackson, and Liepmann, who evaluated
and described the behavioral cor- relates of prescribed lesions in
individual patients and focused investigation on the lateralization and
localization of cognitive abilities in humans. An outgrowth of those
approaches was the systematic development of experimental tasks that
could be used to elucidate the nature of cognitive changes in
individuals with well-described brain lesions.