Neuropsychology

Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how a person's cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Professionals in this branch of psychology often focus on how injuries or illnesses of the brain affect cognitive and behavioral functions. It is both an experimental and clinical field of psychology, thus aiming to understand how behavior and cognition are influenced by brain function and concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of behavioral and cognitive effects of neurological disorders. Whereas classical neurology focuses on the pathology of the nervous system and classical psychology is largely divorced from it, neuropsychology seeks to discover how the brain correlates with the mind through the study of neurological patients. It thus shares concepts and concerns with neuropsychiatry and with behavioral neurology in general. The term neuropsychology has been applied to lesion studies in humans and animals. It has also been applied in efforts to record electrical activity from individual cells (or groups of cells) in higher primates (including some studies of human patients). In practice, neuropsychologists tend to work in research settings (universities, laboratories, or research institutions), clinical settings (medical hospitals or rehabilitation settings, often involved in assessing or treating patients with neuropsychological problems), or forensic settings or industry (often as clinical-trial consultants where CNS function is a concern). Neuropsychology is a relatively new discipline within the field of psychology. The first textbook defining the field, Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology, was initially published by Kolb and Whishaw in 1980. However, the history of its development can be traced back to the Third Dynasty in ancient Egypt, perhaps even earlier. There is much debate as to when societies started considering the functions of different organs. For many centuries, the brain was thought useless and was often discarded during burial processes and autopsies.

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Neuropsychological assessment

Neuropsychological assessment was traditionally carried out to assess the extent of impairment to a particular skill and to attempt to determine the area of the brain which may have been damaged following brain injury or neurological illness. With the advent of neuroimaging techniques, location of space-occupying lesions can now be more accurately determined through this method, so the focus has now moved on to the assessment of cognition and behaviour, including examining the effects of any brain injury or neuropathological process that a person may have experienced.

Stroop effect

In psychology, the Stroop effect is the delay in reaction time between congruent and incongruent stimuli. The effect has been used to create a psychological test (the Stroop test) that is widely used in clinical practice and investigation. A basic task that demonstrates this effect occurs when there is a mismatch between the name of a color (e.g., "blue", "green", or "red") and the color it is printed in (i.e., the word "red" printed in blue ink instead of red ink).

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is a part of the prefrontal cortex in the mammalian brain. The ventral medial prefrontal is located in the frontal lobe at the bottom of the cerebral hemispheres and is implicated in the processing of risk and fear, as it is critical in the regulation of amygdala activity in humans. It also plays a role in the inhibition of emotional responses, and in the process of decision-making and self-control. It is also involved in the cognitive evaluation of morality.

Mapping of Structure-Function Age-Related Connectivity Changes on Cognition Using Multimodal MRI

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Maria Giulia Preti

The relationship between age-related changes in brain structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) with cognition is not well understood. Furthermore, it is not clear whether cognitio

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Where does the engram come from? Study of prefrontal cortex inputs during memory consolidation

Lucie Pauline Dixsaut

The formation and storage of memories has been under deep investigation for several decades. Nevertheless, the precise contribution of each brain region involved in this process and the interplay betw

EPFL2022

Aggression is an evolutionary conserved social behavior that is necessary for an animalÂŽs survival. The neural substrates coordinating aggression are known to exist in the amygdala and the hypothalam

EPFL2021

Neuroprosthetics: Hallucinations and Self Distortions

Explores hallucinations, self distortions, cognitive decline, and altered sensorimotor processing in neuroprosthetics.

Motor Control in Vertebrates MOOC: Neuro Robotics

Explores the hierarchical organization of motor control in vertebrates and layered control architectures.

Neuroanatomy

Neuroanatomy is the study of the structure and organization of the nervous system. In contrast to animals with radial symmetry, whose nervous system consists of a distributed network of cells, animals with bilateral symmetry have segregated, defined nervous systems. Their neuroanatomy is therefore better understood. In vertebrates, the nervous system is segregated into the internal structure of the brain and spinal cord (together called the central nervous system, or CNS) and the routes of the nerves that connect to the rest of the body (known as the peripheral nervous system, or PNS).

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviourism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics, as well as applied psychology, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior.

Topics in psychiatry

Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of deleterious mental conditions. These include various matters related to mood, behaviour, cognition, and perceptions. Initial psychiatric assessment of a person begins with a case history and mental status examination. Physical examinations, psychological tests, and laboratory tests may be conducted. On occasion, neuroimaging or other neurophysiological studies are performed.