ABSTRACT
Neuropsychology is concerned with the relationships between brain structure and mental function and Gall’s and Broca’s investigations can be seen as the beginnings of neuropsychology. In classical neuropsychology the attempt is always made to clarify the relationship between neuronal substrate and mental function (e.g., language processing). In the 1970s a paradigm called cognitive neuropsychology developed that had a significant impact on neuropsychology in general and aphasiology in particular and it differed from classic neuropsychology in some fundamental respects (Coltheart, Patterson, & Marshall, 1980; Coltheart, Sartori, & Job, 1987; Denes & Pizzamiglio, 1999; Denes, Semenza, & Bisiacchi, 1988; Ellis & Young, 1988), and was to some extent a reinvention of neuropsychology. This contention is supported by the fact that its three major features – modularity, an information processing metaphor, and a single case methodology – are not new, but already existed in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Additionally, psycholinguistics and linguistic aphasiology used some of the same approaches as cognitive neuropsychology. The approach developed mainly as a result of experimental cognitive psychologists wanting to test and develop their information processing models of various aspects of human cognition on brain-damaged individuals. Contributors came from North America, Europe and Japan, but the approach developed originally in the UK, and mainly through the early work of John Marshall, John Morton, Tim Shallice, Elizabeth Warrington, Karalyn Patterson and Max Coltheart, and in 1985 the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology was founded by Max Coltheart. So, the separate features of the enterprise are a coming together of the information-processing metaphor, the notion of a mind organised into modules and the development and testing of models against the broken cognition of brain-damaged individuals using psycholinguistically controlled (in the case of language studies) tests. Early models, such as Morton’s logogen model, came out of the psycholinguistics lab, but it was the clinic that provided the data that drove the enterprise.
