Cognitive neuropsychology
[3] In 1861, Paul Broca reported a post mortem study of an aphasic patient who was speechless apart from a single nonsense word: "Tan".
Karl Wernicke subsequently reported patients with damage further back in the temporal lobe who could speak but were unable to understand what was said to them, providing evidence for two potentially interconnected language centres.
Pierre Marie challenged conclusions against previous evidence of Broca's areas in 1906 and Henry Head attacked the whole field of cerebral localisation 1926.
They developed and applied new cognitive processing models to explain experimental data from not only studies of speech and language but also those of selective attention.
The rebirth of neuropsychology was marked by the publishing of two seminal collaborative papers from Marshall & Newcombe (1966) on reading and Warrington & Shallice (1969) on memory.
[6] Subsequently, work by pioneers such as Elizabeth Warrington, Brenda Milner, Tim Shallice, Alan Baddeley and Lawrence Weiskrantz demonstrated that neurological patients were an important source of data for cognitive psychologists.
Patients with amnesia caused by injuries to the hippocampus in the temporal cortex and midbrain areas (especially the mamillary bodies) were of early interest.
Because Molaison's impairment was caused by surgery, the damaged parts of his brain were known, information which was usually not knowable in a time before accurate neuroimaging became widespread.
Whilst both of these claims are still controversial to some degree, the influence led to a focus on brain injury as a potentially fruitful way of understanding the relationship between psychology and neuroscience.
The philosopher Jerry Fodor has been particularly influential in cognitive neuropsychology, particularly with the idea that the mind, or at least certain parts of it, may be organised into independent modules.
Evidence that cognitive skills may be damaged independently seem to support this theory to some degree, although it is clear that some aspects of mind (such as belief for example) are unlikely to be modular.
With improved neuroimaging techniques, it has been possible to correlate patterns of impairment with a knowledge of exactly which parts of the nervous system are damaged, allowing previously undiscovered functional relationships to be explored (the lesion method).
Useful technology in cognitive neuropsychology includes positron-emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
The principles of cognitive neuropsychology have recently been applied to mental illness, with a view to understanding, for example, what the study of delusions may tell us about the function of normal belief.
