A brief introduction

Abstract

My father Arthur Benton had a long and rich professional life. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1935 and published his dissertation research on the development of a personality questionnaire in the same year (Benton, 1935). Before joining the medical division of the US Navy in 1941, Dr. Benton honed his clinical skills, while focusing on the assessment of children and their developmental problems.

Dr. Benton's name is most often associated with the Benton Visual Retention Test (Benton, 1945) that was developed during the war years and with other measures designed to assess aspects of brain disorders. Nonetheless, he continued to have a keen interest in developmental problems, most specifically in the social problems associated with frontal and prefrontal disease; two (Anderson and Eslinger) of the nine articles in this special issue are directly related to Ackerly and Benton's 1947 paper. Moreover, six of the nine articles focus on aspects of development in neuropsychological functioning, suggesting that Dr. Benton's pre-war research with children was formative and influenced his later work and how he taught his students to think about many neuropsychological problems.

Reading through the list of authors for nine articles in this issue of The Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology provides a sampling of the people—students and colleagues—whom Arthur Benton encountered in his postwar professional life. They are representative not only of the students—both pre- and postdoctoral—whom he mentored, but of the colleagues whom he influenced, both in the United States and abroad.

In 1985, when Dr. Benton himself was only 76 years old, he paid tribute to many persons who had helped make neuropsychology an integral part of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa (Benton, 1985). In this monograph, he documented the growth of the Laboratory of Neuropsychology from 1950, when it was housed in what was a 5-by-6-foot closet, to a thriving laboratory that encompasses both clinical research and patient care. Drs. Anderson, Rizzo, and Tranel continue to work in the latest iteration of that original laboratory.

My father would have loved the papers in this issue, as they address many of his favorite topics—test development, hemispheric asymmetries, localization, and, yes, Gerstmann syndrome. Most likely, however, he would have wanted to continue collaborating with his cherished friends and mentoring the students with whom he worked so closely. May his name be for a blessing on all their future endeavors.