Cognitive Neuropsychology and Cognitive Rehabilitation: A Marriage of Equal Partners?

Over the past 15 years, there have been significant advances in the cognitive analyses of many neuropsychological syndromes, including neuropsychological disorders of reading (e.g. Coltheart, 1985 ; Coltheart, Patterson, & Marshall, 1980 ), spoken language (e.g. Coltheart, Sartori, & Job, 1987 ), visual object recognition ( Humphreys & Riddoch, 1987a ; Humphreys & Riddoch, 1987b ), memory ( Parkin, 1987 ; Mayes, 1988 ) and attention ( Jeannerod, 1987 ; Robertson & Marshall, in press ). In such analyses, investigators aim to understand cognitive deficits in patients in terms of impairments to particular processes within a model of normal cognitive function. In addition, evidence from cognitively impaired patients can be used to constrain the functional models of normal cognitive performance. For example, some of the clearest evidence for a so-called “direct” route for naming words (going direct from a lexical representation of the word’s spelling to a lexical representation of its name) comes from neuropsychology (e.g. the finding that patients may retain the ability to read irregular words requiring lexical mediation, while concurrently showing poor word comprehension; Schwartz, Marin, & Safiran, 1979; Funnell, 1983 ).