SYLLABUS FOR SEMINAR IN COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY: W3480Y
SPRING 2001

See note below on language processing...

INTRODUCTION
 

Week 1 (1/18): Introduction to the course and cognitive neuropsychology


PERCEPTION & ATTENTION
 

Week 2 (1/25):   Foundations and future of cognitive neuropsychology: assumptions & methods

Week 3 (2/1):     Disorders of perceiving the visual world (basic vision): blindsight, apperceptive agnosia

Week 4 (2/8):    Is the perception and recognition of faces special? prosopagnosia

Week 5 (2/15):  Locating and attending to objects in space: hemineglect


MEMORY SYSTEMS
 

Week 6 (2/22):  Organization of knowledge about objects (semantic memory): agnosia

Week 7 (3/1):    Encoding information in episodic memory: anterograde amnesia

Week 8 (3/8):   Consolidation and retrieval from remote memory: isolated retrograde amnesia

Week 9 (3/15): SPRING BREAK


ACTION & MOTOR CONTROL

Week 10 (3/22):  Planning and execution of everyday actions: dorsolateral frontal; apraxia


NONVERBAL "COMMUNICATION"

Week 11 (3/29):Hearing and "speaking" the music: amusia, aprosodia; musical savants

Week 12 (4/5):   Number recognition and calculation: acalculia; mathematical prodigies


HIGHER LEVEL ISSUES

Week 13 (4/12):  Emotion, decision making and morality: ventromedial frontal; amygdala

Week 14 (4/19):  Developmental plasticity and reorganization: recovery of function

Week 15 (4/26):  Consciousness: hyper- (phantom limbs) & hypo-consciousness (anosognosia)


Note: There is an obvious absence of topics relating to formal language processing (i.e., lexical access, sentence processing, production) ó an area where there has been considerable contribution to understanding from studies of neuropsychological patients. Although I have covered language processing in the past, this year I replaced these topics with new ones concerning the organization of semantic memory, non-verbal processing, emotion, morality and recovery of function. This reflects, in part, areas where significant new findings have developed within the past years. New findings have also been discovered within language processing, however, these are covered in-depth in W3475/G4470: Psychology and Neuropsychology of Language taught by Dr. Michele Miozzo.