How neuropsychology informs our understanding of developmental disorders
How neuropsychology informs our understanding of developmental disorders
Bruce F. Pennington University of Denver, USA
This review includes 1) an explanation of what neuropsychology is, 2) a brief history of how develop- mental cognitive neuroscience emerged from earlier neuropsychological approaches to understanding atypical development, 3) three recent examples that illustrate the benefits of this approach, 4) issues and challenges this approach must face, and 5) a forecast for the future of this approach. Keywords: Developmental cognitive neuroscience, plasticity, molecular genetics, neural network models, dyslexia, neuropsychology.
This paper will present neuropsychology as a method for understanding childhood disorders. Very simply put, neuropsychology is the study of brain–behavior relations, and developmental neuropsychology is the study of how those relations develop in both typical and atypical cases. More recently, with advances in neural network models, neuroimaging, and genetics, a field of developmental cognitive neuroscience has emerged that tests links across several levels of analysis: etiology, brain development, neuropsy- chology, and behavioral symptoms. So, I will argue that neuropsychology provides an important bridge across these levels and thus among the other methods described in other articles in this Annual Research Review. As it interacts with these other methods,neuropsychology itself isbeing transformed, and will eventually merge into the wider inter- discipline of developmental cognitive neuroscience.
This review includes 1) an explanation of what neuropsychology is, 2) a brief history of how devel- opmental cognitive neuroscience emerged from earlier neuropsychological approaches to under- standing atypical development, 3) three recent examples that illustrate the benefits of this approach, 4) issues and challenges this approach must face, and 5) a forecast for the future of this approach.
What is neuropsychology?
Since the traditional role of neuropsychology has mainly been to understand the behavioral effects of acquired lesions in adults, it has always been a clinical science that has attempted to explain behavioral symptoms in terms of theories of normal brain function. So neuropsychology illustrates well the reciprocal relation that exists between basic and clinical science. We cannot understand clinical phenomena without a theory of normal function, but clinical phenomena sometimes force revisions in our theories of normal function. The history of neuro-
psychology provides many noteworthy examples of both parts of this dialectic: how basic cognitive theory has been revised in response to unexpected clinical data and how advances in basic cognitive theory have changed the constructs and measures clinical neuropsychologists use to understand patients. Patient data have led to theoretical revi- sions in virtually every domain of cognition: vision, attention, long-term memory, short-term memory, language, and reading (M
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