PSYCHOLOGY

Assignment on Biological Methods

TMA-03 - Contributions of Cognitive Neuropsychology

Cognitive Psychology

Psychology is composed of different branches among which cognitive psychology is an important one. In fact, cognitive psychology is used to investigate wonders of the human mind. Cognitive psychology mainly emphasises on the mental processes from internal aspects regardless of those that are physical and obvious (Russel & Cohn, 2012). This means, cognitive psychology handles with individual's mental state that reflects his or her cognitive operations. These cognitive operations include ability to think, solve problems, give attention to something, learn, etc. In addition, it is also important to know that cognitive psychology has been developed over various stages within the field of psychology.

Cognitive Neuropsychology

Cognitive neuropsychology can be seen as a branch of cognitive psychology that is used to understand the structure and functions of different parts of the brain when brain is unable to conduct its operation in normal state. In other words, cognitive neuropsychology deals with people who suffer with disorders of thinking, attention, learning, memory, etc. (Russel & Cohn, 2012). As discussed earlier that cognitive psychology deals with human's mental processes that are responsible for their cognitive abilities. Cognitive neuropsychology, on the other hand, focuses on the study of cognitive effects as result of any brain damage with an emphasis of assuming model of normal cognitive operations (Gazzaniga et al., 2008). Cognitive neuropsychology depends on evidences that are based on case studies where data is gathered from people who have shortfall in any of their brain areas (Russel & Cohn, 2012). In addition, data is also gathered from people demonstrate extra disassociations, which usually involves more than one participant with more than one tasks to do. In fact, one person can have deficiency in one task but act normally on other, while the other person can be normal on the first task but not in the other. This can be seen in a scenario where individual A is not good at reading printed material while he or she understands the spoken words well. In another case where individual B have no difficulties in reading written or printed material but may experience difficulty in understanding spoken words. Researchers are able to use this kind of information to develop a particular cognitive module to reduce problems with word comprehension. This means, there are some areas of brain that are normal but some can be seen as highly specialised areas where an individual can perform better than other (Russel & Cohn, 2012).

Development of Cognitive Neuropsychology

The expansion of cognitive neuropsychology is a result of different stages that it gone through since its discovery. Behaviourism can be seen as one of the important stages that facilitated the growth of cognitive neuropsychology. Researchers have identified some deficits in Behaviourism as it was not capable to address extensive range of empirical information obtained by studying a case as most of the empirics focused on language and memory (Willingham, 2007). Another disadvantage to behaviourism was also noticed that it mainly based on the foundations, which suggests that psychology ...