COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY

Cognitive neuropsychology is a branch of cognitive psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. Cognitive psychology is the science that looks at how mental processes are responsible for our cognitive abilities to store and produce new memories, produce language, recognize people and objects, as well as our ability to reason and problem solve. Cognitive neuropsychology places a particular emphasis on studying the cognitive effects of brain injury or neurological illness with a view to inferring models of normal cognitive functioning. Evidence is based on case studies of individual brain damaged patients who show deficits in brain areas and from patients who exhibit double dissociations. Double dissociations involve two patients and two tasks. One patient is impaired at one task but normal on the other, while the other patient is normal on the first task and impaired on the other. For example, patient A would be poor at reading printed words while still being normal at understanding spoken words, while the patient B would be normal at understanding written words and be poor at understanding spoken words. Scientists can interpret this information to explain how there is a single cognitive module for word comprehension. From studies like these, researchers infer that different areas of the brain are highly specialised. Cognitive neuropsychology can be distinguished from cognitive neuroscience, which is also interested in brain damaged patients, but is particularly focused on uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes

认知神经心理学是认知心理学的一个分支，其目的是了解大脑的结构和功能如何与特定的心理过程相联系。认知心理学是一门研究心理过程如何影响我们储存和产生新记忆、产生语言、识别人和物体的认知能力，以及我们推理和解决问题的能力的科学。认知神经心理学特别强调研究脑损伤或神经疾病的认知影响，以期推断出正常认知功能的模型。证据是基于对个别脑损伤患者的案例研究，这些患者的脑区存在缺陷，而患者则表现出双重离解。双解离包括两名患者和两项任务。一名患者在一项任务中受损，而另一名患者在另一项任务中正常，而另一名患者在第一项任务中正常，在另一项任务中受损。例如，患者A在阅读印刷文字时表现较差，而在理解口语文字时表现正常;患者B在理解书面文字时表现正常，而在理解口语文字时表现较差。科学家可以解释这些信息来解释单词理解是如何有一个单一的认知模块的。从这些研究中，研究人员推断大脑的不同区域是高度专门化的。认知神经心理学可与认知神经科学区分开来，认知神经科学也对脑损伤患者感兴趣，但特别关注揭示认知过程背后的神经机制