ABSTRACT
Recent advances in the neurosciences and the theme of this volume call for an updated review of neuropsychological evidence relevant to DCT. Such evidence has always been interesting to the extent that it bears on theoretical assumptions and hypotheses based originally on behavioral data alone. The most obvious example is the verbal–nonverbal distinction that showed up in neuropsychological data before the development of DCT. However, neuropsychology did not reveal the specific functional properties of the two systems, such as their independence and additivity in memory tasks, the integrative mnemonic capacity of nonverbal imagery coupled with the redintegrative power of concrete retrieval cues (the conceptual peg effect), and so on. Neuropsychology alone cannot reveal such capacities unguided by prior behavioral studies, but it can provide independent convergent evidence that might confirm or challenge conclusions from behavioral data. Reciprocally, DCT can be useful to neuropsychology as a systematic framework for analyzing and interpreting the brain-behavior relations that form its empirical domain.
