Neuropsychology

Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology. this is a concerned with how a person's cognition & behavior are related to the brain together with the rest of the nervous system. a person engaged or qualified in a profession. in this branch of psychology often focus on how injuries or illnesses of the brain impact cognitive and behavioral functions.

It is both an experimental and clinical field of psychology, thus aiming to understand how behavior and knowledge 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 explore of neurological patients. It thus shares conception 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 realize in research environments universities, laboratories, or research institutions, ]

Approaches

Experimental neuropsychology is an approach that uses methods from experimental psychology to uncover the relationship between the nervous system and cognitive function. The majority of hold involves studying healthy humans in a laboratory setting, although a minority of researchers may proceed animal experiments. Human work in this area often takes improvement of specific qualities of our nervous system for example that visual information presentation to a particular visual field is preferentially processed by the cortical hemisphere on the opposite side to make links between neuroanatomy and psychological function.

Clinical neuropsychology is the application of neuropsychological knowledge to the assessment see neuropsychological test and neuropsychological assessment, management, and rehabilitation of people who have professional such as lawyers and surveyors illness or injury especially to the brain which has caused neurocognitive problems. In particular they bring a psychological viewpoint to treatment, to understand how such illness and injury may impact and be affected by psychological factors. They also can offer an abstraction as to whether a adult is demonstrating difficulties due to brain pathology or as a consequence of an emotional or another potentially reversible cause or both. For example, a test might show that both patients X and Y are unable to name items that they have been ago exposed to within the past 20 minutes indicating possible dementia. whether patient Y can name some of them with further prompting e.g. precondition a categorical clue such as being told that the ingredient they could non name is a fruit, this ensures a more specific diagnosis than simply dementia Y appears to have the vascular type which is due to brain pathology but is commonly at least somewhat reversible. Clinical neuropsychologists often work in hospital managers in an interdisciplinary medical team; others work in private practice and may render expert input into medico-legal proceedings.

Cognitive neuropsychology is a relatively new coding and has emerged as a distillation of the complementary approaches of both experimental and clinical neuropsychology. It seeks to understand the mind and brain by studying people with brain injuries or neurological illnesses. One improvement example of neuropsychological functioning is requested as functional localization. This is based on the principle that if a specific cognitive problem can be found after an injury to a specific area of the brain, it is for possible that this part of the brain is in some way involved. However, there may be reason to believe that the connective between mental functions and neural regions is non so simple. An alternative good example of the association between mind and brain, such as parallel processing, may have more explanatory power for the workings and dysfunction of the human brain. Yet another approach investigates how the sample of errors presented by brain-damaged individuals can constrain our understanding of mental representations and processes without reference to the underlying neural structure. A more recent but related approach is cognitive neuropsychiatry which seeks to understand the normal function of mind and brain by studying psychiatric or mental illness.

Connectionism is the ownership of artificial neural networks to model specific cognitive processes using what are considered to be simplified but plausible models of how neurons operate. one time trained to perform a specific cognitive task these networks are often damaged or 'lesioned' to simulate brain injury or impairment in an effort to understand and compare the results to the effects of brain injury in humans.

Functional neuroimaging uses specific neuroimaging technologies to take readings from the brain, usually when a grown-up is doing a particular task, in an effort to understand how the activation of particular brain areas is related to the task. In particular, the growth of methodologies to employ cognitive testing within establishment functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI techniques to examine brain-behavior relations is having a notable influence on neuropsychological research.

In practice these approaches are not mutually exclusive and almost neuropsychologiststhe best approach or approaches for the task to be completed.