Review of Successful Private Practice in Neuropsychology: A Scientist-Practitioner Model by Mary Pepping. 2003. San Diego: Academic Press. 206 pp., $44.95.

Neurology of Cognitive and Behavioral Disorders. Orrin Devinsky and Mark D'Esposito. 2004. New York: Oxford University Press. 451 pp., $99.95 (HB).

A problem with many behavioral neurology texts is the tendency to minimize the connection between behavior and integrated neuroscience theory. Often the illustrative neurological principles are not grounded in behavioral neuroscience, but, instead, present unusual conditions in a type of “Gee whiz” display. The relationship of these conditions to neuroscience is often lost. In Neurology of Cognitive and Behavioral Disorders, the relationship of neurologic condition to neuroscientific principles is clearly explicated. This is perhaps the greatest strength of this addition to the Oxford University Press Contemporary Neurology Series.

This study examined the validity of the Spanish and English Neuropsychological Assessment Scales (SENAS) in comparison with clinical diagnosis of normal cognition versus cognitive impairment, not demented (CIND) versus demented in elderly Hispanics and Whites. Relationships between SENAS scales and diagnosis were essentially the same in Hispanics and Whites. Verbal memory measures were most strongly related, with more than 35% of the variance in these measures accounted for by diagnosis independent of effects of education, age, gender, and language. Diagnosis accounted for more than 10% of the variance (19% on average) in 11 of the 17 measures examined in this study. Logistic regressions showed that verbal memory was important both for distinguishing normal from CIND and CIND from demented. Object naming improved discrimination of CIND from demented beyond that of verbal memory alone. These results provide evidence of equivalent validity across Hispanics and Whites. (JINS, 2005, 11, 620–630.)

Recent and relevant books.

Avaliação Neuropsicológica, Psychologica, No. 34. Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação de Coimbra. Coimbra: Gráfica de Coimbra Ltda., 300 pp., $12.

Psychologica journal is published every four months. Generally written in Portuguese, its contents are organized by the Departments of Psychology and Education at Coimbra University, Portugal. Its aim is to divulge scientific work in psychology and education, emphasizing the interaction between theory, research, and practice.

McCrea and colleagues (2005) sought to evaluate the efficacy of a multidimensional assessment approach to the management of concussion in contact sport in their article entitled “Standard regression-based methods for measuring recovery after sport-related concussion.” They used the Standardized Regression-Based (SRB) method to determine when an athlete was recovered. Though not in the above article, the SRB is often presented alongside the Reliable Change Index adjusted for practice (RCIp) and the clinician must choose which to use with limited direction. This letter seeks to further elaborate on why the SRB may be preferred and how tighter methodology is perhaps even more important.

Textbook of Traumatic Brain Injury. Jonathan M. Silver, Thomas W. McAllister, and Stuart C. Yudofsky (Eds.). (2005). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing. 771 pp., $99.00.

This comprehensive textbook provides both depth and breadth of the current state of knowledge about traumatic brain injury (TBI) with the added advantage that it's all between one set of book covers. The 40 chapters are thoughtfully organized into 7 sections. Section titles announce the scope of the book: Epidemiology and Pathophysiology, Neuropsychiatric Disorders, Special Populations and Issues, Social Issues, Treatment, and Prevention.

Recent studies have described neuromaturation and cognitive development across the lifespan, yet few neuroimaging studies have investigated task-related alterations in brain activity during adolescence. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain response to a spatial working memory (SWM) task in 49 typically developing adolescents (25 females and 24 males; ages 12–17). No gender or age differences were found for task performance during SWM. However, age was positively associated with SWM brain response in left prefrontal and bilateral inferior posterior parietal regions. Age was negatively associated with SWM activation in bilateral superior parietal cortex. Gender was significantly associated with SWM response; females demonstrated diminished anterior cingulate activation and males demonstrated greater response in frontopolar cortex than females. Our findings indicate that the frontal and parietal neural networks involved in spatial working memory change over the adolescent age range and are further influenced by gender. These changes may represent evolving mnemonic strategies subserved by ongoing adolescent brain development. (JINS, 2005, 11, 631–644.)

Pure word deafness (PWD) is a rare neurological syndrome characterized by severe difficulties in understanding and reproducing spoken language, with sparing of written language comprehension and speech production. The pathognomonic disturbance of auditory comprehension appears to be associated with a breakdown in processes involved in mapping auditory input to lexical representations of words, but the functional locus of this disturbance and the localization of the responsible lesion have long been disputed. We report here on a woman with PWD resulting from a circumscribed unilateral infarct involving the left superior temporal lobe who demonstrated significant problems processing transitional spectrotemporal cues in both speech and nonspeech sounds. On speech discrimination tasks, she exhibited poor differentiation of stop consonant-vowel syllables distinguished by voicing onset and brief formant frequency transitions. Isolated formant transitions could be reliably discriminated only at very long durations (>200 ms). By contrast, click fusion threshold, which depends on millisecond-level resolution of brief auditory events, was normal. These results suggest that the problems with speech analysis in this case were not secondary to general constraints on auditory temporal resolution. Rather, they point to a disturbance of left hemisphere auditory mechanisms that preferentially analyze rapid spectrotemporal variations in frequency. The findings have important implications for our conceptualization of PWD and its subtypes. (JINS, 2005, 11, 456–470.)

Forensic Neuropsychology: A Scientific Approach. Glenn Larrabee (Ed.). 2005. New York: Oxford University Press, 479 pp., $68.50.

As a practitioner of the art and as an instructor for a course in “neuropsychology and the law,” I can assure you that all of my students will be assigned Larrabee's Forensic Neuropsychology in coming semesters. The editor and his co-authors have assembled a thoughtful and comprehensive introduction to a rapidly evolving area of science and practice. The unique contributions that neuropsychological assessment and an understanding of brain-behavior relationships can provide are fast becoming the rule, rather than the exception, in civil, criminal, and, sometimes, even probate litigation.

The following is a correction for an error that occurred in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, Vol. 8, No. 6, pp. 781–793. The article titled “Neuropsychological functioning in a cohort of HIV infected women: Importance of antiretroviral therapy,” by J.L. Richardson et al., had errors in Table 5, which appeared on page 788. Please refer to the numbers in boldface that shows the incorrect and correct values, respectively.

Brain Fiction: Self-deception and the Riddle of Confabulation, by William Hirstein. (2005). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 289 pp., $35.00.

Why do some patients with brain damage construct seemingly false answers to questions, which they believe are true and accurate? Such confabulation is the topic examined in this book. Not only does Dr. Hirstein integrate the anatomical, neurological, and neuropsychological knowledge accumulated thus far on confabulation, but his training as both a neuroscientist and a philosopher provides a unique perspective on confabulation by integrating issues broadly related to the philosophy of the mind. What is also proposed in this well written book is the notion that elements of confabulation can be seen in healthy individuals and in persons with disorders less overtly neurological in nature than those with clearly documented neurological disorder.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) experiments frequently administer substantially adapted cognitive tests. This study was designed to identify FMRI correlates of a well-standardized clinical measure presented with minor adaptations. We administered the WAIS–III Symbol Search (SS) and a visuospatial control task to fifteen adults during FMRI. SS-related brain activity was identified, followed by analyses of activity related to performance level. Compared to the control task, SS was associated with greater activity in bilateral medial occipital, occipitoparietal, occipitotemporal, parietal, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (DLPFC). Across both tasks, slower processing speed was also related to greater activity in these areas, except right DLPFC. Greater activity in left DLPFC was specifically related to slower processing speed during SS. Performance was consistent with education levels. Findings suggest that SS performance involves regions associated with executive and visual processing. Furthermore, slower SS performance was related to greater recruitment of left hemisphere regions associated with executive function in other studies. (JINS, 2005, 11, 471–476.)

Although the development of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) after traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been described, it is unknown whether children with TBI and ADHD have greater neuropsychological impairments than children with TBI alone. This study examines attention, executive functioning, and memory in children with TBI-only and TBI + ADHD. Caregivers of 82 children with severe TBI completed structured psychiatric interviews at enrollment to diagnose premorbid ADHD and one-year after injury to diagnose post-injury ADHD. Children underwent neuropsychological testing one year after injury. One memory measure significantly differentiated children with TBI-only from children with newly developed ADHD [secondary ADHD (S-ADHD)] and those with premorbid ADHD that persisted after injury [persisting ADHD (P-ADHD)]. Compared with the TBI-only group, children with TBI + ADHD had worse performance on measures of attention, executive functioning, and memory. Results reveal that in children with severe TBI, the behavioral diagnosis of ADHD is associated with more difficulty in attention, executive functioning, and memory. Additionally, results suggest greater deficits in memory skills in the S-ADHD group compared with the P-ADHD group. Although findings provide preliminary support for distinguishing P-ADHD from S-ADHD, further research is needed to investigate neuropsychological differences between these subgroups of children with severe TBI. (JINS, 2005, 11, 645–653.)

Frontal-lobe epilepsy (FLE), temporal-lobe epilepsy (TLE), and matched-control subjects were administered the Trail Making Test (TMT) of the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS; Delis et al., 2001), which assesses set-shifting on a visuomotor sequencing task. Results indicated that patients with FLE were impaired in both speed and accuracy on the switching condition relative to patients with TLE and controls. The two patient groups did not differ from controls on the four baseline conditions of the test, which assess visual scanning, motor speed, number sequencing, and letter sequencing. In addition, seizure-related variables (i.e., age of seizure onset, duration of epilepsy, and seizure frequency) failed to correlate with set-shifting performance in patients with FLE. These results suggest that patients with FLE can be reliably distinguished from those with TLE and control subjects on set-shifting as measured by the DKEFS TMT. (JINS, 2005, 11, 477–481.)

Event Related Potentials: A Methods Handbook. Todd C. Handy (Ed.). 2005. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press, 404 pp., $60.00.

The dramatic increase in interest in functional magnetic resonance imaging in recent years has been accompanied by a wealth of literature on the scientific foundations of the procedure and the highly complex methodological issues that must be considered during experimental design and data analysis. To some extent, progress in this exciting area has eclipsed significant developments in other areas of neuroimaging, particularly the “neuromagnetic” approaches that study time-locked brain electrical potentials or magnetic field changes produced in the course of processing perceptual, cognitive, and motor events. However, there has been increasing recognition that the study of event-related electrical potentials and neuromagnetic responses remains a critical complement to “hemodynamic” approaches because of their exquisite temporal resolution and because they provide a more direct index of neural activity related to stimulus events than procedures dependent on the coupling of brain activity with cerebral blood flow. In this context, Event Related Potentials: A Methods Handbook, edited by Todd C. Handy, represents an important and long overdue handbook. It provides practical and concise information on ERP methods that is comparable to literature available for fMRI techniques.

Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach, by Timothy T. Rogers and James L. McClelland. (2004). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 425 pp., $50.00/£32.95.

This book is aimed at all scientists interested in semantic cognition, even those with limited experience of computational modeling. It benefits from concise and logically presented text and the effective use of figures and illustrations, with details of simulations tucked away in the Appendix. The length of the book defines it not only as a useful addition to a reference collection, but also an excellent primer for young researchers, postgraduates, and even advanced undergraduates.

Neurodevelopment in Schizophrenia. Matcheri S. Keshavan, James L. Kennedy, and Robin M. Murray (Eds.). (2004). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 506 pp., $150.00.

Liberman and Corrigan stated in a 1992 editorial in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, “The question is no longer whether schizophrenia is a brain disease but rather what type of disease underlies its characteristics, symptoms, signs, and associated disabilities” (p. 119). It has been 13 years since Liberman and Corrigan wrote this editorial, and there has been a steady increase in the interest in schizophrenia among neuropsychologists as judged by the quality and quantity of papers presented at professional meetings and published in neuropsychology journals. In the April 2005 issue of The American Psychologist, Heinrichs asserted that effect sizes derived from neuropsychological tests of memory, attention, language, and reasoning are twice as large as those obtained from neuroimaging studies on individuals with schizophrenia. He concludes that “schizophrenia is a complex biobehavioral disorder that manifests itself primarily in cognition.” (p. 229). However, large effect sizes on neuropsychological tests are considerably “downstream” from the genesis of the disorder, which is widely believed to be neurodevelopmental in nature, rather than neurodegenerative. What is the neuropathological mechanism that underlies this complex cognitive disorder? This book, Neurodevelopment in Schizophrenia, is an edited volume that brings together basic and clinical neuroscientists who are trying to answer this question—what is the disease mechanism underlying schizophrenia that derails normal neurodevelopment?

Cerebellar involvement in motor and non-motor sequence learning was examined with serial reaction time tasks (SRT). Our sample consisted of 8 children and adolescents who had undergone surgical removal of a benign posterior fossa tumor (PFT) during childhood. None of them had undergone chemotherapy or cranial radiation therapy (CRT). Ages ranged from 1–11 years at surgery and 9–17 years at testing. The children were tested not earlier than 2.5 years after surgery (M = 5.9 years), enabling brain plasticity and recovery of functions. Their performance was compared with a matched control sample. The PFT group was not impaired in the implicit learning of sequences, as reflected in their performance in blocks with a repeated sequence, both before and after a random block. However, in the perceptual task, their performance deteriorated more than that of the control group when a random block was introduced, suggesting that it was more difficult for the patients to respond flexibly or change their response set when encountering changing task demands. These results are in line with another study by our group on task switching with the same patients. (JINS, 2005, 11, 482–487.)

Essays in Social Neuroscience. John T. Cacioppo and Gary G. Berntson (Eds.). 2004. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 168 pp., $32.00/£20.95.

Essays in Social Neuroscience, edited by John T. Cacioppo and Gary G. Berntson, is a slim collection of highly engaging and—for the overextended neuropsychologist—enjoyably brief essays surveying current research and theory in the emerging field of social neuroscience. Each contributor attests to the variety of examples of research bridging the historic divide between neuroscience and social psychology. For neuropsychologists, this volume offers enlightening demonstrations of the potential for traditional methods in neuroscience to speak to the complex and reciprocal interplay between neural systems and the social world. From Sue Carter's essay “Oxytocin and the Prairie Vole: A Love Story” to Shelley E. Taylor's contribution “The Accidental Neuroscientist: Positive Resources, Stress Responses, and Course of Illness,” these essays speak to such diverse issues as interpersonal attraction, loyalty, emotional reactivity, and environmental contributions to autoimmune disease. Some essays speak more to the potential for bridging the gap than to demonstrated success in this effort, but those essays remain pleasurable, rewarding reads. The large majority of essays, four of which are described in more detail below, beautifully exemplify the fruitfulness of this area of inquiry.