An untapped resource: Treatment as a tool for revealing the nature of cognitive processes

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role of treatment in cognitive neuropsychological research, arguing that treatment for cognitive impairments should be viewed as a powerful methodology for developing, evaluating, and extending cognitive theories. We suggest that the key aim of cognitive neuropsychology should be characterized as the use of data from the investigation and treatment of individuals with cognitive disorders to develop, evaluate, and extend theories of normal cognition. To support this assertion, this paper discusses examples of how treatment studies have informed theory. The major methodological tool is generalization logic, both generalization across items and generalization across tasks. However, an alternative is to use case series methodology to test predicted correlations between particular cognitive skills and response to treatment. These methods enable explicit testing of a theory or discrimination between theories, focusing on the nature of cognitive representations, the architecture of the cognitive system, and the acquisition of cognitive skills.

Keywords:

• Cognitive neuropsychology
• Treatment
• Therapy
• Intervention
• Theory

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the colleagues we have worked with over the years who have contributed to the evolution of the ideas in this paper, particularly (in alphabetical order) Wendy Best, Maria Black, Gerhard Blanken, Sally Byng, Anne Castles, Max Coltheart, and David Howard. We thank Brenda Rapp for inviting submission of this paper and for her careful and detailed comments that have resulted in a much improved final paper. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. During the preparation of this paper, Lyndsey Nickels was funded by a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Senior Research Fellowship, Saskia Kohnen by an NHMRC project grant and a Macquarie University Research Fellowship, and Britta Biedermann by a Macquarie University Research Fellowship and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant.