ON THE METHODS OF COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY

Contemporary cognitive neuropsychology attempts to infer unobserved fe atures of normal human cognition, or 'cognitive architecture', from ex periments with normals and with brain-damaged subjects in whom certain normal cognitive capacities are altered, diminished, or absent. Funda mental methodological issues about the enterprise of cognitive neurops ychology concern the characterization of methods by which features of normal cognitive architecture can be identified from such data, the as sumptions upon which the reliability of such methods are premised, and the limits of such methods-even granting their assumptions-in resolvi ng uncertainties about that architecture. With some idealization, the question of the capacities of various experimental designs in cognitiv e neuropsychology to uncover cognitive architecture can be reduced to comparatively simple questions about the prior assumptions investigato rs are willing to make. This paper presents some of simplest of those reductions. 1 Introduction 2 Theories as functional diagrams and graph s 3 Formalities 4 Discovery problems and success 5 Some examples 6 Res ource/PDP models 7 Conclusion