Until recently, the dominant view was that schizophrenia patients have limited, if any, neuropsychological impairments, and those that are observed are only secondary to the florid symptoms of the disorder. This view has dramatically changed. This review integrates recent evidence demonstrating the severity and profile of neuropsychological…

Fundamental assumptions concerning the cause of learning disabilities are described and criticized. At a broader level, research and theory in three different paradigms are discussed: (1) neuropsychological; (2) information processing; and (3) applied behavior analysis. Four recommendations for future progress in the conceptualization and…

This review of the literature on the neuropsychology of autism identifies several consistent findings, such as: existence of neuropsychological impairments in a wide range of domains; large individual differences in certain neuropsychological domains; greater difficulty with tasks involving social information; possible association of the amygdala…

The attentional blink refers to the transient impairment in perceiving the 2nd of 2 targets presented in close temporal proximity. In this article, the authors propose a neurobiological mechanism for this effect. The authors extend a recently developed computational model of the potentiating influence of the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system…

The forebrain cholinergic neurons are localized in the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM), the major source of cholinergic innervation to the neocortex and to the amygdala, and in the medium septum-banda diagonalis complex, which provides cholinergic inputs to the hippocampus (Mesulam et al. 1983; Woolf et al. 1984; Nicoll 1985). Basic and…

The study compared the Halstead-Reitan (H-R) neuropsychological test profiles of 25 normal, 47 learning disabled (LD) and 20 brain damaged (BD) young adults. Multivariate analyses indicated that the H-R battery could differentiate these groups beyond chance expectancy and that the neuropsychological deficits in LD performance are intermediate in…

The human brain is lateralized, different functions being housed in each hemisphere. Several assumptions which are mistakenly considered fact by researchers include: (1) the left hemisphere is for rational functions, while the right is for intuitive functions; (2) the hemispheres do not interact as well with each other as they should; (3) the use…

Reports that people who are predominantly left-handed apparently are able to withstand moderate brain damage with relatively few of the motor problems observed in right-handed victims of brain damage. Other brain-related differences between left- and right-handed individuals are also noted. (JN)

Various human mental activities are examined, a theory of brain function presented, and the possible nature of the ultra-intelligent machine" suggested. Some of the social repercussions of such machines are briefly discussed. (AL)

Discusses current research (including that involving amnesiacs and snails) into the nature of the memory process, differentiating between and providing examples of "fact" memory and "skill" memory. Suggests that three brain parts (thalamus, fornix, mammilary body) are involved in the memory process. (JN)

Debate over whether mental images are visual or spatial representations is seen as based on the false premise that they must be one or the other. Visual neurophysiological research and experiments with a brain-damaged patient (impaired visual representations) suggest that mental imagery has distinct visual and spatial representation components.…

This article first outlines a tentative neurocognitive model of oral language and reading. It then reviews recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of the development of oral language and reading and brain-imaging research on dyslexia in light of the proposed neurocognitive model. Finally, research on the plasticity of neural systems…

A neural theory of visual attention (NTVA) is presented. NTVA is a neural interpretation of C. Bundesen's (1990) theory of visual attention (TVA). In NTVA, visual processing capacity is distributed across stimuli by dynamic remapping of receptive fields of cortical cells such that more processing resources (cells) are devoted to behaviorally…

Neurological research has demonstrated that brain activity in animals originally dedicated to the production and regulation of physical activity can be decoupled from that physical activity. Furthermore, animals can use the brain activity in this new condition to achieve particular results such as moving a cursor on a screen. These findings are…

Past autism research has often been dedicated to tracing the causes of the disorder to a localized neurological abnormality, a single functional network, or a single cognitive-behavioral domain. In this review, I argue that autism is a "distributed disorder" on various levels of study (genetic, neuroanatomical, neurofunctional, behavioral).…