Neuropsychology

Queen Square has been at the forefront of neuropsychological research for over 50 years, and many of the techniques of neuropsychological assessment were pioneered here by Elizabeth Warrington and colleagues at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. The ICN has always had close links with the hospital, and the collaborations throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s between Warrington and the ICN’s founding director, Tim Shallice, have become classic studies in their field. In the 1990’s, ICN collaborations with the National Hospital continued to be extremely fruitful. The work of Shallice and Paul Burgess on patients with frontal lobe damage has had a profound impact on our understanding of the role of the frontal lobes in the organization of everyday behaviour, and led to clinical assessment tools that are used worldwide (the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome battery, the Hayling and Brixton tests, and the Multiple Errands Task).

Today, the research groups at the ICN use neuropsychology as a research tool to complement other techniques. Whilst there are still close ties with the National, members of the ICN also collaborate with many of the other major London hospitals, including, St Thomas’s, St George’s, the Homerton, St Mary’s and Charing Cross, to name a few.

New technologies are having a profound impact on the ways patients can be tested. In addition to tried and tested paper and pencil type tests, techniques such as virtual reality, computer touch-screen technology and eye trackers are used to improve reliability and accuracy, as well as making testing more enjoyable for the patients. Neuropsychological techniques also reflect developments in imaging technology. For example, patients with brain injuries may take part in functional fMRI to investigate the effects of a lesion on the functioning of other, undamaged areas of the brain. Furthermore, the fact that neuropsychology has the power to demonstrate whether a brain region is necessary for a certain function, provides a powerful test of the hypotheses that are generated by imaging studies.

Testing hippocampal function

(i). The patient had no difficulty remembering the objects' locations when tested from the same viewpoint
(ii), but when tested from a different viewpoint
(iii), the patient performed much less well than healthy controls.

i) subjects see a series of events in which different characters give them different items in different locations

ii) they are then asked questions such as "Which item was given to you by this person?". Our hippocampal patient had difficulty with such questions, which require memory for the context of an event (episodic memory), but was unimpaired on memory for the items themselves.

This page last modified 17 November, 2011 by [ICN Web Team]