Brain Imaging, Connectionism, and Cognitive Neuropsychology

I’m still an ultra-cognitive-neuropsychologist after all these years, and so my comments on Trevor Harley’s most interesting book review will be from that perspective. Ultra-cognitive-neuropsychologists take cognitive neuropsychology to be a branch of cognitive psychology. The aim of cognitive psychology is to learn more about the mental information-processing systems that people use to carry out various cognitive activities. Some cognitive psychologists do that by studying the performance of people whose cognitive processing systems are normal. Others do it by studying people in whom some cognitive processing system is abnormal: Such investigators are cognitive neuropsychologists. Cognitive neuropsychologists are not studying the brain. Investigating the brain processes upon which carrying out cognitive activities depends is a different discipline with a different name: It is called cognitive neuroscience. Some cognitive neuropsychologists are also cognitive neuroscientists because they do both kinds of work (Tim Shallice, Chris Frith, or Martha Farah, for example); some are just plain cognitive neuropsychologists (John Marshall, Alfonso Caramazza, or Max Coltheart, for example).

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