Cognitive Neuropsychology

Cognitive neuropsychology is a branch of cognitive psychology that studies how the structure and function of the brain relate to specific psychological processes such as memory, language, recognition and reasoning. It places particular emphasis on the cognitive effects of brain injury or neurological illness, drawing on evidence such as case studies of individual brain-damaged patients and double dissociations, where one patient is impaired at one task but normal at another while a second patient shows the reverse pattern, to infer models of normal cognitive functioning and the specialization of different brain areas. It is distinguished from cognitive neuroscience, which also studies brain-damaged patients but focuses more on uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes rather than on the cognitive processes themselves.