Max Coltheart, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science

Cognitive neuropsychology is a branch of cognitive psychology. The aim of cognitive psychology is to learn more about the architectures of cognition by developing and testing information-processing models intended as descriptions of the procedures people use to accomplish performance in some particular cognitive domain. This aim can be pursued by investigating people who are skilled in such performance. But it also can be pursued by investigating people who once were skilled but now as a consequence of brain damage exhibit specific and selective breakdown of performance in some cognitive  domain. Inferences about the normal functional architecture of some cognitive system can be made by studying the patterns of preserved and impaired performance in those with such disorders; this is cognitive neuropsychology. The unit will describe the basic methods used to carry out this kind of work and will illustrate what has been learned by these methods about a variety of cognitive domains: reading and spelling, face recognition, object recognition, semantics, belief formation, and spoken-word production, for example.