ABSTRACT
Cognitive neuropsychology is founded on the assumption that normal and disordered cognition are each best understood in relation to each other. One of the clearest examples of how neuropsychological impairments can illuminate our understanding of normal cognition is in the area of consciousness. Much of the renewed interest in consciousness, on the part of scientifically-minded psychologists, followed from discoveries made with brain-damaged patients in the 1970s. Research with amnesic patients revealed that certain types of learning were preserved, despite the patients’ unawareness of the acquired information (Warrington & Weiskrantz, 1970), and research with cortically blind patients showed residual visual abilities of which the patients were also unaware (Poppel, Held, & Frost, 1973). Soon these neuropsychological dissociations between conscious and unconscious information processing were joined by a host of others affecting visual perception, and research on consciousness developed to encompass patient-based research, behavioral methods with normal subjects, and functional neuroimaging of both patients and normal subjects.
