<i>Cognitive Neuropsychology</i>twenty years on

Abstract

Cognitive neuropsychology began in the second half of the nineteenth century when neurologists such as Lichtheim, Wernicke, Bastian, and others began to make inferences about the cognitive architecture of the intact language-processing system from studying the different ways in which spoken or written language abilities broke down after brain damage. They even began to express their proposals about this architecture by means of explicit box-and-arrow diagrams: hence the term “the diagram-makers” that was applied to them. These cognitive neuropsychologists were also cognitive neuroscientists: They were interested not only in the functional architecture of cognition, but also in how the components of such an architecture were localized in the brain. Their cognitive neuropsychology was successful (their diagrams of the language-processing system are simplified versions of diagrams that enjoy contemporary support; see Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001, for examples) but their cognitive neuroscience was not. They did not succeed in localizing in the brain any of the hypothesized components of a functional architecture of cognition, and this failure exposed the whole enterprise to damning criticisms from noncognitively-oriented neurologists such as Head (1926). This, plus the demise of cognitive psychology itself consequent upon of the rise of behaviourism at the beginning of the twentieth century, saw cognitive neuropsychology practically vanish from the scientific scene for the first half of the twentieth century. However, after the advent of the so-called