Explorations in cognitive neuropsychology - Alan J. Parkin

Cognitive neuropsychology has now established a major place in the teaching of undergraduate psychology degrees and is an important topic of postgraduate research. The subject is also of increasing interest to clinicians because of its links with devising remediation procedures for people with brain injury. Explorations in Cognitive Neuropsychology is the first major text to appear on this topic since the late 1980s and thus introduces the reader to a vast amount of research previously unavailable in textbook format. The book is written in a lively and engaging style which nonetheless enables the reader to get a scholarly, in-depth overview of this important field. The coverage of topics is very broad-ranging. It begins with an overview of the subject including issues such as research strategy and advances in neuroimaging. Following this are chapters on blindsight, agnosia, facial processing impairments, and the rapidly growing area of neglect. The next chapter is devoted to studies of the split brain. Two chapters then cover the enormous developments in devising functional architectures of the language system from the observation of discrete language impairments. Various aspects of memory impairments are then discussed and the book ends with a consideration of frontal lobe functions. At various points the book also covers the contribution of connectionist modelling to cognitive neuropsychology.