Reviews: Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, High-Level Motion Processing: Computational, Neurobiological, and Psychophysical Perspectives

The Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology offers a comprehensive and thorough review of neuropsychology which will be of interest to academic researchers and clinicians. It provides a tour through the historical landmarks in neuropsychology, draws attention to the seminal papers in each subject and, in a number of chapters, refers the interested reader to more detailed review papers. The book is an edited collection of thirty-eight chapters, which are grouped into ten main themes: (1) methodological problems in neuropsychology, (2) language disorders, (3) memory disorders, (4) recognition disorders, (5) movement disorders, (6) spatial disorders, (7) attentional disorders, (8) special syndromes (eg acalculia, emotional disorders following brain damage), (9) dementia and (10) recovery of function. The first section provides a review of the basics of neuropsychology: historical background to the growth of the discipline, theoretical assumptions (eg the value of double dissociations), standard experimental paradigms, and approaches to data analysis. There are also excellent introductory chapters to neuroimaging and electrophysiological methods. In general, electrophysiological methods have not been used by neuropsychologists as frequently as functional neuroimaging techniques such as PET and fMRI. Consequently, the chapter on electrophysiological methods provides an interesting overview of how these techniques have been used and could be developed for neuropsychological research. For example, the electroencephalogram (EEG) has been used to demonstrate that language recovery in aphasia might be mediated by compensatory strategies in the right hemisphere, rather than recovery of left hemisphere processing. More recent work using evoked potentials has provided support for the idea that developmental dyslexia may not be a specific language/reading disorder, but linked to visual/perceptual impairments (eg within the magnocellular pathway). The remaining sections provide comprehensive review chapters on the classic neuropsychological disorders one would expect to find in all good neuropsychology textbooks: for example, aphasia, dyslexia, apraxia, amnesia, agnosia, neglect and frontal lobe dysfunction. However, in addition, there are a number of chapters on disorders not always covered in such detail, for example, impairments of semantic memory, of conceptual thinking in aphasia, the neuropsychology of music and the neuropsychology of consciousness. There are five chapters focussing on the neuropsychology of dementia. Issues relating to differential diagnosis and the neuropsychological profile of Alzheimer's disease are covered in some detail. The chapters are not only factually informative for students, but are thought provoking for researchers and clinicians. There are still many aspects of these diseases that are relatively poorly understood and with an estimated 9 million cases of dementia by 2040 research on this area is timely. Della Sala and Spinnler have written an interesting chapter describing unusual cases of patients with `slowly progressive isolated cognitive deficits' ie cognitive impairments that `̀ mimic selective focal lesions (eg strokes) and . worsen with time'' (page 775). Given that these impairments have not been widely documented, and no systematic classification system exists, the authors provide a number of case studies. For example, patient LM was reported to have `slowly progressive simultanagnosia'. She had difficulty in visuospatial tasks, showed signs of apperceptive agnosia and constructive apraxia, in the absence of general intellectual deterioration or the memory problems usually associated with dementia (until many years after the onset of her visuospatial problems). Patient MC had a selective and progressive impairment in naming objects and in accessing semantic information from words, despite good episodic memory and `low level' visual processing abilities. These rather unusual cases provide us with an interesting opportunity to explore the anatomical areas and functional deficits associated with particular neuropsychological impairments. Reviews Perception, 1999, volume 28, pages 1051 ^ 1054