Springer Series in Neuropsychology – serie

Edited by a leading scholar in the field, Eye Movements andVisual Cognitionpresents an up-to-date overview of thetopics relevant to understanding the relationship betweeneye movements and visual cognition, particularly in relationto scene perception and reading. Cognitive psychologists,neuropsychologists, educational psychologists, and readingspecialists will find this volume to be an authoritativesource of state-of-the art research in this rapidlyexpanding area of study.

Presents experimental methodology, neuropsychologicalinterpretations, and clinical applications of cognitivemicrogenesis theory along with research findings on visualinformation processing, anxiety, defense, attention, andpersonality assessment.

We have had a number of interesting cases come to our attention over the years. The following are illustrative of some of the issues that can emerge at the interface between neuropsychology and the law. The first involved a patient suffering from a debilitating fear of heights. The fear seemed a reasonable consequence of the fact that he had been a passenger on a plane that crashed while attempting take off. Given that many of the passengers and crew died or were seriously injured, this man was quite fortunate. In fact, he could be said to have lived a charmed life. It had been just a year since he had been involved in an industrial accident in which he could have easily died. He came away from that accident with injuries to his legs and a concussion. That accident had also involved him falling from a considerable height so that there was some discussion among clinic staff about how well the patient's circumstances and symptoms fit the diagnostic category of "posttraumatic stress disorder. " Supportive psychotherapy was used as an aid in dealing with his re­ curring memories of the plane crash and systematic desensitization was quite successful in reducing the most disruptive consequences of his fear of heights. However, during the course of treatment, it became apparent that there were a number of problems that had not been addressed.

Nonspecialists are often surprised by the issues studied and the perspectives assumed by basic scientific researchers. Nowhere has the surprise traditionally been greater than in the field of psychology. College students anticipate that their psychology courses will illuminate their personal problems and their friends' per­ sonalities; they are nonplussed to discover that the perception of geometric forms and the running ofT-mazes dominates the textbooks. The situation is comparable in the domain of linguistics. Nonprofessional observers assume that linguists study exotic languages, that when they choose to focus on their own language, they will examine the meanings of utterances and the uses to which language is put. Such onlookers are taken aback to learn that the learning of remote languages is a marginal activity for most linguists; they are equally amazed to discover that the lion's share of work in the discipline focuses on issues of syntax and phonol­ ogy, which are virtually invisible to the speaker of a language. Science moves in its own, often mysterious ways, and there are perfectly good reasons why experimental psychologists prefer to look at mazes rather than at madness, and why linguists study syntax rather than Sanskrit. Nonetheless, it is a happy event for all concerned when the interests of professionals and non­ specialists begin to move toward one another and a field of study comes to address the "big questions" as well as the experimentally most tractable ones. Discourse Ability and Brain Damage reflects this trend in scientific research.

Synesthesia comes from the Greek syn (meaning union) and aisthesis (sensation), literally interpreted as a joining of the senses. Synesthesia is an involuntary joining in which the real information from one sense is joined or accompanies a perception in another. Dr. Cytowic reports extensive research into the physical, psychological, neural, and familial background of a group of synesthets. His findings form the first complete picture of the brain mechanisms that underlie this remarkable perceptual experience. His research demonstrates that this rare condition is brain-based and perceptual and not mind-based, as is the case with memory or imagery. Synesthesia offers a unique and detailed study of a condition which has confounded scientists for more than 200 years.

Contemporary Reviews in Neuropsychology arrays the most current research on hemispheric specialization of the brain. Special attention is given to the functioning of the right hemisphere in the processing of spatial and sequential information. Among the topics discussed are the nature of hemisphere asymmetries, lexical processing, spatial memory, and humor and the right hemisphere.

Linguistic Analyses of Aphasic Language represents results from linguistic and neurolinguistic research on aphasic language performance. The contributions encompass all linguistic levels, ranging from phonetics to discourse, and present results on languages other than English. The findings and applied methods are both relevant to the study of aphasia in general and to cross-linguistic analyses. Furthermore, they have clear implications for language and speech therapy and thus show the importance of linguistic concepts for language testing and therapeutic intervention.

In summary, considerable controversy and research have been generated from the automatic/effortful distinction. Hasher and Zacks (1979) initially stated that all manipulations (e. g. , practice, individual differences such as age, orienting instructions) must produce null effects in order to satisfy the criteria that a process is "automatic. " However, Zacks et al. (1984) have more recently noted that automatic processes may range in degree from relative insensitivity to task and subject variables (e. g. , frequency processing) to those that are more vulnera- ble to disruptive effects (e. g. , temporal processing). A review of the literature reveals that individuals are sensitive to frequency information even if manipUla- tions alter the slope of the judgments. Perhaps the application of dual-task metho- dology to the measurement of capacity demands will be useful in classifying processes along an attentional continuum. Moreover, there has been a tendency to dichotomize automatic/effortful processes rather than to characterize them as ranging from low to high attentional demands.Recent evidence (Maki & Ostby, 1987) suggests that attention may be important only in the initial (early) stages of processing frequency information. Therefore, a major difference that may emerge between automatic and effortful processing could be the degree of sus- tained attention required from individuals. In the following section, we review the findings obtained in the application of the automatic/effortful framework to the elderly and neurological/psychiatric populations.

Neuropsycholinguistics - the interaction between linguistics, psycholinguistics, and aphasiology - has, over the past two decades, established itself as a multidisciplinary science worthy of its recent attention in Drs. Nespoulous and Villiard's Morphology, Phonology and Aphasia. In this new volume in the Springer Series in Neuropsychology, the editors have most successfully developed a multidisciplinary team of research through the organization of two symposia - one on "Morphology and Aphasia", the other focused on "Phonology and Aphasia". Toward the goal of better understanding the aphasic patients' verbal behavior, the contributing authors of this important work offer their respective expertise, continuing the recent evolution of developments in the fields of morphology and phonology.