Neuropsychology: what is it and what is its object of study?
An interdisciplinary field that relates behavior to human brain activity.
Before learning about this branch of psychology, it is useful to know what neurosciences are, since neuropsychology is just that, a science devoted to the nervous system..
Neurosciences, as its name suggests, is a discipline that includes many sciences, which are responsible for studying the nervous system from different points of view, thus contributing to a better understanding and comprehension of it: we are talking about neurology, psychology, biology, chemistry, pharmacology, genetics, among others.
What is neuropsychology?
Having understood the above, it is now appropriate to ask ourselves, what is neuropsychology? It is a neuroscience that has as its main objective to the study of the brain and the relationship between this organ and the behavior of people.. He is interested in studying both healthy people and those who have suffered brain damage.
Main characteristics
These are the aspects that characterize neuropsychology.
1. Neuroscientific character
As already mentioned, neuropsychology is a behavioral neuroscience, is a behavioral neuroscience that relies on the natural scientific method to study the brain. in order to study the brain, it uses the hypothetico-deductive procedure (it elaborates a hypothesis, and then undoes or corroborates it, this depending on the results that exist after the experimentation) and sometimes the analytical-inductive (it carries out experiments, so that it can test the functional relation between different controlled variables).
2. Study of higher mental functions
He is interested in studying the neural bases of any human being, and how these correlate with various mental processesand how these correlate with diverse mental processes such as: thinking, executive functions, language, memory, motor skills, perception, etc.
3. It has a great interest in the associative cerebral cortex.
Neuropsychology is very interested in this cortex for two specific reasons. The first is because this area of the brain is primarily responsible for all higher cognitive processes.. And secondly, because it is unfortunately one of the parts of the brain that tends to be most affected when there is a disease or disorder, resulting in a Wide range of damage to the aforementioned mental functions.
Although it is not the only area that can derive in it, affections to the corpus callosum, basal ganglia, hippocampus, amygdala, thalamus and cerebellum also trigger in the deterioration of the cognitive and emotional.
4. Makes a study of the adverse effects arising from brain injuries.
The following must be made clear: neuropsychology and clinical neuropsychology are not the same.. The former focuses on the study of the brain-behavior relationship in healthy subjects, and to a certain extent can be understood and viewed as cognitive neuroscience. The second deals only with those people who acquire some damage in their nervous system and disorders that derive from it: aphasia, amnesias, apraxias, agnosias, etc.
5. It focuses solely and exclusively on the human being
Just as there is "human" neuropsychology, so to speak, there is also neuropsychology that is interested in the brain-behavior relationship of other mammalian species, each with its own field, its own specificity.
It should be noted that there are notable differences between the two, one of them being the fact that the cognitive processes of humans are very different qualitatively and quantitatively from those of animals; for example, the proportion and extension in the neocortex of some animals differs greatly from that of humans.
The knowledge that can be acquired from both species also goes in different directions, it is not possible, for example, to induce experimental lesions of the nervous system in humans (only in rare cases in humans). (only in rare cases where there is therapeutic neurosurgery). That is why psychophysiological research with animals has been valuable to understand in a certain way some basic processes of human beings, but it is by no means the same, it is not possible to establish total generalizations between what happens with them and us, for the same reason as mentioned above, there are notable differences between one nervous system and another.
6. Interdisciplinary
Neuropsychology was born as an autonomous entity thanks to the contributions and work of many other disciplines such as neurology, biology, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, experimental psychology, pharmacology, cognitive psychology, among others.
This interdisciplinary character It also goes in the sense that clinical neuropsychologists work hand in hand with other health professionals for the evaluation and treatment of brain damage: neurologists, neurosurgeons, physiotherapists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, clinical psychologists, etc.
Bibliographical references:
- Antonio, P. P. (2010). Introduction to neuropsychology. Madrid: McGraw-Hill.
(Updated at Apr 15 / 2024)