The aim of this very ambitious volume is to provide information about “the pragmatics of test selection, interpretation, and report writing,” “a practitioner's guide to actual test interpretation and integration,” and “a comprehensive guide to neuropsychological assessment.” Groth-Marnat decries the absence of such “a book,” as if he expected that the broad base of neuropsychological knowledge was to be found in a single volume. There was the tacit assumption that the knowledge required for neuropsychological assessment could be adequately and sufficiently obtained from “a book” of this type. This expectation appears quite unrealistic, naïve, and simple-minded. Based on current guidelines in the profession (à la the Houston Conference), it should be expected that most of the knowledge Groth-Marnat seeks in one book can be acquired only with an extended, specialized course of study followed by intense, supervised experience. That is where one should obtain information about test selection, interpretation and integration so that the end product is “a clear, coherent description of the impact that brain dysfunction has had on a person's cognitions, personality, emotions, interpersonal relationships.” That type of knowledge, and report-writing skill, is not to be had by reading “a book.” Integrating the complexities of test data, and writing effectively, are both exceedingly difficult to teach even in an apprentice situation, and more so through a single volume. This objection thus ventilated, now on to the meat of the book.

Although some studies have reported a category specific naming deficit in Alzheimer's patients (invariably for living things), others have failed to replicate this finding (Laws et al., in press). Inconsistencies may partly stem from the fact that category effects are hidden in group analyses because individual Alzheimer's patients show category deficits in opposing directions, namely, some living and some nonliving (Gonnerman et al., 1997). Additionally, category effects may depend upon the specific composition of living things, such as the ratio of animals to fruits and vegetables, though this has never been explicitly examined. To examine this, we conducted a more detailed fractionation of living and nonliving categories for individual patients.

Isosceles triangular backgrounds influence line bisection performance in normal control participants and patients with hemispatial neglect. When the triangles are oriented asymmetrically with the vertex in 1 visual field, and the base in the other, the perceived midpoint of horizontal lines within the triangle is shifted towards the base, and away from the vertex. The current study examines this illusion further by systematically varying the extent of the triangle presented. With only fragments of the triangle in the background of the line, the vertex is the critical component driving the illusory shift in perceived midpoint. Patients with neglect and controls are equally sensitive to the illusion. Similar geometric illusions that are also intact in neglect, along with these results, suggest that preattentive, implicit visual processing is preserved in neglect and drives these illusions.

Most patients with neglect demonstrate a crossover effect on line bisection. Crossover refers to a pattern of performance in which long lines (>10 cm) are bisected ipsilateral to brain injury and short lines (<2 cm) are bisected contralateral to brain injury. Crossover bisections on short lines are of interest because they are not predicted by contemporary theories concerning neglect. However, we propose that the effect depends on two independent factors that normally influence bisection performance but are merely exaggerated in neglect—a tendency to overestimate the length of short lines and underestimate long lines and a tendency to orient attention preferentially in one spatial direction. We predicted that both patients with unilateral left and right hemisphere injury would demonstrate crossover on line bisection and that they would overestimate short lines and underestimate long lines upon direct visual inspection. Further, the 2 groups were predicted to demonstrate crossover in opposite directions owing to different lesion-induced biases in attentional orientation. Testing 5 patients with right hemisphere injury and 7 patients with left hemisphere injury confirmed each prediction. Additionally, errors in length estimation were exaggerated among patients with right hemisphere injury, most of whom had neglect. It is concluded that while crossover is accentuated in cases of neglect, it is not a consequence of neglect per se. As such, crossover bisections are not at odds with contemporary neglect theory. (JINS, 2002, 8, 107–114.)

The effect of mild head injury on event-related potential (ERP) correlates of Stroop task performance was explored with the aim of further elucidating the basis of processing impairments after mild head injury. Computer- and card-based Stroop tasks were employed to assess attention function. A sequence of incongruent color words were presented followed by a sequence of congruent color words (printed in congruent colors). Control performance was equivalent on computer- and card-based versions of the incongruent task and faster on the congruent card task than the preceding congruent computer task. The mild head injury group were as fast as controls on the computer-based task but made more errors. However, they were relatively slower on both the congruent and incongruent parts of the card-based task and made more errors in the incongruent task. ERP correlates of computer-based Stroop task performance suggested a greater allocation of attention resources in the incongruent condition in both groups in the form of relatively greater negativity in the latency range 350 to 450 ms with a distribution consistent with the activation of the anterior cingulate gyrus. In addition the mild head injured group showed relatively greater enhancement than the control group in this latency range in both congruent and incongruent conditions. There was, however no evidence of reduced amplitude P1, N1, N2, or P3b deflections. Trails, digit symbol, digit span and auditory verbal learning tests (AVLT) were also administered. Mild head injured participants were impaired only on the AVLT. The finding of greater ERP negativity in the mild head injured group is consistent with greater allocation of attention resources to achieve equivalent performance in the computer-based Stroop task. (JINS, 2002, 8, 828–837.)

Patients with apraxia are more impaired when performing transitive pantomimes than intransitive gestures. This dissociation might be related to the differences in movement complexity. Alternatively, the programs for intransitive gestures might be better defined, more widely distributed, or easier to activate than are those for transitive pantomimes. The purpose of this study was to test the complexity versus representational hypotheses. Twenty right-handed normal subjects both performed and discriminated correct from incorrect transitive pantomimes and intransitive gestures. The discrimination was performed by having subjects point at illustrations of hand postures. The subjects performed better when discriminating postures than when performing gestures or pantomimes. On both the production and discrimination tests, subjects performed better with intransitive gestures than transitive pantomimes. Although the finding that even normal subjects had more difficulty performing transitive pantomimes than intransitive gestures might appear to support the complexity hypothesis, that subjects also had more difficulty discriminating transitive than intransitive postures supports the representational activation hypothesis. (JINS, 2002, 8, 958–963.)

It is now generally accepted that central nervous system treatments for childhood cancer can result in significant cognitive impairment, most commonly in the areas of attention/concentration. We review the literature on attentional and neurocognitive deficits in this population, and also efforts to remediate attentional deficits in other brain injured populations. It was our goal to develop an innovative, psychologically based outpatient rehabilitation program that would improve dysfunctional attentional processes and associated neuropsychological deficits. The characteristics of this program and a pilot study of its effectiveness are described. Participants were 31 off-therapy cancer survivors with documented attention deficits. Twenty-one completed the cognitive remediation program (CRP) and 10 served as comparisons. All participants completed a test of vigilance attention, 2 tests with an attentional component, and an arithmetic academic achievement measure. When the scores of the 2 groups were compared, the CRP group exhibited statistically significant improvement on all attentional measures. In contrast, the comparison group did not manifest any significant changes. Neither group demonstrated statistically significant changes on the arithmetic achievement test. We believe that the CRP has potential for improving attention/concentration, but generalization to academic achievement remains unproven. Phase 3 clinical trials and the documentation of long-term treatment gains are needed. Furthermore, it will be necessary to demonstrate the ecological validity of the CRP. With these caveats, this therapeutic approach may be helpful in other populations of cognitively impaired children and young adults, such as patients who have suffered traumatic brain injury. (JINS, 2002, 8, 115–124.)

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines a handbook as “a book containing concise information on a particular subject: a guidebook.” Handbooks come in all shapes and sizes. Often they run into volumes, but occasionally—as in this case—they take the form of a single book. We already have an Encyclopedia of Memory and Learning (Squire, 1992), a Handbook of Memory Disorders (Baddeley et al., 1995), a Handbook of Emotion and Memory (Christianson, 1992), and at least one volume on memory within the Handbook of Neuropsychology (Cermak, 2001), but this would appear to be the first dedicated handbook devoted to the cognitive science of memory. When this handbook landed on my desk it struck me as being the “mother of all handbooks,” encompassing 700 pages!

A patient with progressive posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) was examined on several tests of visual cognition. The patient displayed multiple visual cognitive deficits, which included problems identifying degraded stimuli, attending to two or more stimuli simultaneously, recognizing faces, tracing simple visual stimuli, matching simple shapes, and copying objects. The patient was also impaired in identifying visual targets contained at the global level within global–local stimuli (i.e., smaller letters that compose a larger letter). Although the patient denied any conscious awareness of the global form, he nevertheless displayed a normal pattern of global interference when asked to identify local level targets. Thus, the patient processed the global information despite not being consciously aware of such information. These results suggest that global–local processing can take place in the absence of awareness. Possible neurocognitive mechanisms explaining this dissociation are discussed. (JINS, 2002, 8, 461–472.)

Books are landmarks in the history of sciences. Some reflect the views of influential opinion leaders in a certain period—as it was common in the past. Some reflect the state of the art on a particular field reviewed by multiple authors—as became frequent nowadays. Some still reflect a combination of both tendencies collecting the opinion of several authors under the general framework of the leading opinion of an Editor. In this last case the Editor is also an active writer of seminal chapters. This was the case of the first edition of Principles of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology, edited by M.-Marsel Mesulam.

In this very unique book Franco Fabbro acquaints us with basic concepts on the cerebral organization of language and takes us into the wonderful if sometimes confusing world of the neurolinguistics of bilingualism. It is a monograph with a wealth of information gleaned chiefly from behavioral neurology and neurolinguistics.

Cognitive deficits in neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF-1) have been documented in both the verbal and visuospatial domains. Previous investigations from our laboratory have determined a specific pattern of “spared” (Picture Arrangement, Picture Completion, and Rapid Automatized Naming) and “impaired” (Judgment of Line Orientation, Vocabulary, and Block Design) performance on cognitive measures in this population when compared to sibling-matched controls in pairwise designs. Growth curve analyses were conducted on these repeated measures in 19 patients with NF-1 and their siblings to investigate the longitudinal course and growth pattern of these spared and impaired measures. Results indicated that over time children with NF-1 do not catch up to their siblings on impaired measures, and they continue to perform similarly to their siblings on the spared measures. With respect to growth rates, on average across the 6 cognitive measures there was no significant difference between the groups. However, the variation among families for level of performance was estimated to be larger than variation among siblings within a family for 2 out of 6 cognitive measures (i.e., providing for these 2, Vocabulary and Rapid Automatized Naming, evidence of substantial familial correlation), suggesting that there is need to consider NF-1 associated deficits within a familial context. (JINS, 2002, 8, 838–846.)

Essential tremor (ET) is the most common type of movement disorder, although its etiology and neurophysiological substrates remain unclear. While thought to be a benign condition, it has yet to be studied from a neuropsychological perspective. We examined the neurocognitive functioning of 13 nondemented subjects with severe ET, including aspects of memory, cognitive flexibility, and attention. Results revealed that 12/13 subjects demonstrated impairment on 1 or more cognitive measures in comparison with published normative data. The pattern of findings was suggestive of relative dysfunction of frontal-mediated processes not unlike that seen in Parkinson's disease. These deficits were found in subjects irrespective of the presence of cognitive complaints, depression, or the existence of other potential neurocognitive risk factors. These findings suggest that mild cognitive deficits are not uncommon in association with severe ET and may be related to subcortical systems. (JINS, 2002, 8, 125–129.)

In the first chapter the author states “this book is about disabilities affecting children that are due to some malfunction in the brain or nervous system.” The author intends this book as an introduction to the study of developmental disorders, particularly from a neuropsychological perspective. By the author's writing, the text is intended for advanced undergraduate courses in psychology and special education, or for use with beginning graduate courses, particularly in the area of clinical psychology. From my own read of Professor Freides' book, I believe it is most appropriate for advanced undergraduate courses. I found the text to be reasonably comprehensive regarding its stated aims, readable, informative, and there was a clear effort to reference both older, more “classic” studies, and also to insure current research references from relevant literature.

The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that facial expressions are either necessary or sufficient to produce emotional experience. Researchers have noted that the ideal test of the necessity aspect of this hypothesis would be an evaluation of emotional experience in a patient suffering from a bilateral facial paralysis; however, this condition is rare and no such report has been documented. We examined the role of facial expressions in the determination of emotion by studying a patient (F.P.) suffering from a bilateral facial paralysis. Despite her inability to convey emotions through facial expressions, F.P. reported normal emotional experience. When F.P. viewed emotionally evocative slides her reactions were not dampened relative to the normative sample. F.P. retained her ability to detect, discriminate, and image emotional expressions. These findings are not consistent with theories stating that feedback from an active face is necessary to experience emotion, or to process emotional facial expressions. (JINS, 2002, 8, 130–135.)

In the latter half of the 18th century, Samuel Johnson noted that, “there is a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man decayed in his intellect. If a young or middle-aged man, when leaving a company, does not recollect where he laid is hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered in an old man, people will shrug their shoulders and say ‘His memory is going.

Since its publication in 1982, the National Adult Reading Test (NART; Revised Version, NART–R) has become a widely accepted method for estimating premorbid levels of intelligence in neuropsychological research. However, the assumption that NART/NART–R performance is relatively independent of brain damage has been increasingly challenged in recent years. In a number of conditions, including Alzheimer dementia and Korsakoff's syndrome, studies have indicated a deterioration in reading ability, leading to an underestimated premorbid IQ. In a reaction to these studies, some researchers have advocated the use of demographic variables as a more suitable foundation for accurately predicting premorbid intelligence. We addressed this issue by calculating IQ estimates on the basis of NART/NART–R, demographic variables, and a combination of the two approaches and by comparing these with current WAIS/WAIS–R IQ in patients with Korsakoff's syndrome, Alzheimer dementia, frontal or temporal lobe lesions, and in healthy controls. Estimated premorbid IQs did not differ across groups, whether derived from NART/NART–R or demographic variables. Those based on NART/NART–R demonstrated higher correlations with current WAIS/WAIS–R IQ in controls and patients than those derived from demographic variables. An equation combining NART scores with demographic variables did not significantly increase the amount of variance in IQ explained by NART only, either in patients or controls. The data offer reassurance regarding the continued use of NART as a valid estimate of premorbid intelligence in a number of conditions. (JINS, 2002, 8, 847–854.)