ABSTRACT
Neuropsychology is first and foremost a clinical discipline. Its primary aim in this case is to understand the deficits of a patient as a whole. The patients examined are individuals with focal lesions of the brain caused by a vascular accident, an injury, a tumor, or similar anomalies. Also included are patients with more diffuse brain deterioration such as that found in degenerative disorders (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease) (→AGING). Diagnosing the disorder is very time-consuming, and every mental function can be altered: language in cases of aphasia (→LANGUAGE); recognition in various types of agnosia, which depend on the modality (auditory agnosia and visual agnosia) or on the type of information processed (object agnosia, face agnosia, spatial agnosia) (→PERCEPTION, SPACE); memory in cases of amnesia (→MEMORY); elaborate gestures in apraxia (→ACTION); and reasoning and executive functions in frontal syndromes, and so on (→CONTROL, REASONING AND RATIONALITY). Diagnosis is fundamental for determining appropriate treatment and follow-up care for patients, since it cannot be reduced to disorderspecific functional rehabilitation. Other tasks are understanding how patients function in the activities of daily living and evaluating their spared functions in view of reintegration into the working world. Hence the importance of having a good team of clinical neuropsychologists with all the necessary specializations.
