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.

Neuropsychology is the main theme of issue No. 34, with special attention directed to neuropsychological evaluation. According to the Editors, Mário Simões and Alexandre Castro-Caldas, the field is still underdeveloped in Portugal, although there is growing interest on the part of various professionals. Their goal was to assemble an issue that describes the present state of neuropsychological evaluation in Portugal, with articles on theory, empiricism, and methodology. The issue includes writings by internationally renowned specialists such as Muriel D. Lezak, Barbara A. Wilson, Cathy Price, and Karl Friston. The issue includes 19 articles, 4 in English and 15 in Portuguese, with abstracts in French, English, and Portuguese.

The journal begins with an exceedingly rich article by Lezak about the principles, evolution, contribution, and objectives of neuropsychological evaluation. She examines the neuropsychological components of behavior, assessment of neuropsychological problems, and comments on issues relative to the interpretation of data from neuropsychological testing. Barbara Wilson contributes a very interesting article addressing the relationship between neuropsychological evaluation and cognitive rehabilitation, illustrating that, more than the actual neuropsychological tests, the establishment of goals is the main tool for structuring and evaluating cognitive rehabilitation. She emphasizes the importance of rehabilitation centered on daily life problems that cannot always be gauged through neuropsychological tests. Dr. Wilson proposes the “goal planning” approach that permits patients, their families, and rehabilitation teams to negotiate meaningful objectives, define how to attain them, and subsequently evaluate the rehabilitation's impact on daily life.

Price and Friston then analyze the concepts of cognitive degeneration and anatomy within the context of relationships between neuronal systems, lesional model, functional neuroimaging, and neuropsychological evaluation. They examine neuroimaging and neuropsychological data in normal participants and discuss degeneration in cognitive anatomy. Castro-Caldas elaborates on how to locate regions of interest for studying the brain of someone who is illiterate, and reviews articles that highlight differences in neuropsychological assessment of task performance and functional imaging between literate and illiterate individuals. This important article focuses on the possibility of identifying cognitive processes that are dependent on schooling and on the regions of the brain involved in this adaptive process. Castro-Caldas has extensive experience in this field, evident in his thorough analysis of the differences and similarities between behavioral processes and assessment patterns in functional neuroimaging exams, comparing schooled and unschooled groups.

Neurologist Isabel Pavão Martins describes the contribution of sodium amytal to identifying brain lateralization in cognitive functions, and Manuela Guerreiro discusses the importance of age and schooling variables on psychometric test performance used in neuropsychology, emphasizing the need to standardize the tests in large populations to obtain adequate norms for every country. Isabel Santana then writes about Mild Cognitive Deficit as a transition between physiological cognitive aging and dementia. The role of neuropsychological examination in the assessment and treatment of epileptic individuals is addressed by Élia Baeta, who describes how epilepsy interferes with brain functioning, stressing the point that evaluation methods and instruments should be selected according to one's goals. She also asserts that the examiner should be aware of each patient's characteristic epilepsy profile and of the therapeutic regimen.

Gabriela Leal addresses aphasia and its assessment instruments and methodologies. A speech therapist, Leal, also discusses the importance of evaluation in diagnosis and prognosis, and in creating a therapeutic intervention program. She describes the Lisbon Aphasia Assessment Battery (BAAL). São Luís Castro, Susana Calo, and Inês Gomes present, in English, a judgment task of rhyming words and discuss its utility in neuropsychological evaluation. Cristina P. Albuquerqu describes speech processing impairments in learning and reading disabilities, and analyzes available evaluation procedures, This article is followed by one, in English, in which Brenda Townes, Juanita Rosenbaum, Isabel Pavão Martins, and Castro-Caldas propose a battery of neurobehavioral tests for assessing children within different cultural contexts.

Isabel P. Martins and Tânia Fernandes present an empirical study about cognitive and neurological evaluation in recently schooled populations, and the psychologist Clara de Santos Loureiro writes about the manifestations of selective hemi-spatial inattention in children. Isabel Alberto discusses attention assessment based on an analysis of its dimensions and the tests available in Portugal, while Mario Simões, Ana Lopes, and Salomé Pinho present tests published in the last few years commonly used in neuropsychological evaluation of memory in children and adolescents. A complete guide to neuropsychological anamnesis (a semistructured neuropsychological interview to collect the patient's complete history) is provided by Marta Gonçalves and Castro-Caldas. Tânia Fernandes analyzes the presuppositions, objectives, study methodologies, and contributions of cognitive neuropsychology. Finally, Mario R.Simões and Castro-Caldas debate some of the issues related to education and professionalization in neuropsychology.

This issue of Psychologica provides a broad, multidisciplinary overview of neuropsychology in Portugal today and contains truly important contributions, especially as regards neuropsychological evaluation. With 19 articles about different topics written by professionals from various fields, it can be quite useful not only in Portuguese universities but also hospitals and clinics where diagnosis, evaluation, prognosis, and rehabilitation play an important role. Most of the information in this issue can be used in other Portuguese-speaking nations, although the evaluation instruments, as they stand, cannot be applied in other countries due to phonetic and semantic word differences and because the norms must be standardized for each population. Although a short abstract in English/French accompanies each article, these are too condensed to permit a nonfluent professional to make full use of the articles' contents. All of these pieces are interesting, albeit lacking in homogeneity. This issue is an important milestone in Portuguese neuropsychology insofar as it brings together a richness of knowledge and information presently being generated in that country.