ABSTRACT
T he two themes in this volume have been to make writing research more visible and central in mainstream cognitive psychology and to draw on mul-tiple disciplines in writing research. This chapter illustrates the recent paradigm shift from cognitive psychology to cognitive neuroscience with an overview of an interdisciplinary research program on writing. A psychologist, drawing on cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuropsychology, developmental psychology, and educational psychology, and a neurophysicist in the fi eld of radiology, with expertise in multiple imaging modalities, contributed to this programmatic research. Here we will place research on the writing brain in its historic context. We begin with pioneering studies on acquired writing disorders, based on clinical studies of lost and preserved writing functions or correlations between lost functions and abnormal structures in autopsy studies. We then proceed to more recent brain imaging of adults and children with normal writing development or with developmental writing disorders. In the fi nal section, we discuss cutting-edge research issues that may lead to greater understanding of the writing brain.
