ABSTRACT
Cognitive neuropsychology first emerged as a coherent discipline in the 1970s as a reaction to the then dominant approach in neuropsychology. This earlier approach to neuropsychology (the ‘classical approach’) sought to characterise the performance of people with aphasia by defining them in terms of their localisation of lesion (see Shallice, 1988, for further discussion of this approach). The aim here was to understand the psychological functions of parts of the cortex by investigating the patterns of deficits shown by individuals with lesions in these areas, and identify syndromes defined in terms of deficits that frequently co-occurred. Over the last 20 years, in the UK at least, cognitive neuropsychology has expanded to become the dominant approach in neuropsychology. Part of the reason is that it moved neuropsychology from being of interest only to those concerned with brain behaviour relationships to a major source of evidence on the nature of normal processing. Another reason is that good cognitive neuropsychology pays real attention to providing accounts that address how individual people with brain lesions behave, often using sophisticated experimental methods to investigate the determinants of their performance.
