Cognitive Neuropsychology Careers

The 19th century French physician Pierre Paul Broca called Monsieur Leborgne – one of his patients - “Tan” because that was the only word the patient spoke, despite the fact that Tan could understand words and follow directions.

Based on studies of language impairment by researchers who came before him, Broca theorized that the left part of Tan’s cerebral cortex, known as the left frontal region, had incurred some form of damage or injury. After Tan died in 1861, Broca’s post-mortem showed exactly that, and Broca’s hypothesis and discovery began a series of studies that, more than 100 years later, led to the field today recognized as “cognitive neuropsychology.”

During the 1960s, growing interest in both cognitive psychology and the physiology of the brain formed the basis for a new field called neuropsychology, but it took until the 1980s for the first textbooks on “cognitive neuropsychology” to be published, making it a formally recognized field.

Neuropsychology Specialties

Jordan Grafman, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., calls cognitive neuropsychology one of two areas falling under the umbrella term neuropsychology.

Grafman says that cognitive neuropsychologists research brain-behavior relationships by studying patients who have suffered some form of brain injury or trauma, such as those returning from war, or those who have had a stroke. They also study brain deficits caused by developmental disorders or disorders of impaired ability resulting from a disability. Cognitive neuropsychologists are research oriented and generally do not focus on diagnosing or treating patients.

Cognitive Cousins

In addition to falling under the umbrella term of neuropsychology, cognitive neuropsychology is closely linked to the related field of Cognitive Psychology. But cognitive psychology approaches the research and study of cognition from a different angle than cognitive neuropsychology.

Cognitive psychologists study how normal or “unimpaired” individuals acquire, process and store information, and how they use information to make decisions and solve problems.

More specifically, cognitive psychology focuses on the complexity and number of tasks that individuals normally use and complete on a daily basis: how individuals talk with others, learn different languages, understand and conceptualize topics- oftentimes simultaneously. They also attempt to unravel how people perform complex computational operations, write masterpieces, store, and recall memories, and form beliefs, social behaviors and perceptions.

The Main Areas of Cognitive Research Include:

• Memory
• Action
• Object recognition
• Planning

Cognitive psychologists formulate empirical studies by hypothesizing or posing a question on how individuals learn or perform certain tasks, and by using data from their observations to either confirm or negate their hypotheses.

Putting the Neuro in Cognitive Studies

Cognitive neuropsychologists seek the same answers to questions about cognitive functioning as cognitive psychologists, but formulate their studies differently. They focus on individuals with “deficits” in brain functioning, deficits caused by either brain injuries or developmental disabilities.

In other words, cognitive neuropsychologists extrapolate knowledge from observed cases of psychological dysfunction into theories and hypotheses about the information processing systems that explain these dysfunctions. They then try to “map” the genesis and execution of specific information processing tasks to regions of the brain.

By discovering how neurological damage affects psychological and neural functioning, they are able to uncover the mechanisms involved with normal brain function, complementing research from the field of Cognitive Psychology.

Together, the two cognitive psychological fields add to the body of knowledge of normal and abnormal brain functioning – in addition to many other areas of neuroscientific research and study.