Topics:
 Agnosia
 Amnesia
 Aphasia
 Autism
 Delusions
 Disorders of the self
• Dyslexia
• Modelling delusions with hypnosis
• Schizophrenia
• Specific language impairment (SLI)
Disorder:

 abnormal low performance level on some task (eg. Dyslexia)
Unusual perceptual experience, OR an AVERAGE experience in the population (eg. Synaesthesia, schizophrenia)
Acquired disorder : occurs in people that have brain damage or injury later in life as they lost the ability to perform a particular skill normally. It can be sudden or transitional.
Developmental disorder : occurs in someone (child) that have never acquired a particular skill normally in the first place and it transitions into adulthood.
Cognitive approach to understand disorders:
Levels of description
 BILOGICAL/NEURAL: genetic abnormality, damage to left temporal pole
 BEHAVIOURAL: what we can observe, e.g. poor word reading, unable to produce long sentences
 COGNITIVE (middle spectrum): abnormal functioning of mental processes. e.g. impairment in memory, language ability, belief evaluation.
 Provides an important explanatory link between brain and behaviour
 Explains what the biological approach is trying to achieve in FUNCTIONAL terms (not structural)

COGNITIVE MODELS
The best theories are represented as EXPLICIT models, which specify the sequence of processes involved in performing some cognitive task
Study cognitive disorders in
 CASE STUDIES: allows to look at rare condition, case studies are pure and selective and helps to understanding the process in detail
 GROUP STUDIES: provide general impression of typical ways that the population function
Across these two, there are also , experimental studies, longitudinal studies (mostly for developmental cases), training
AIM OF COGNITIVE RESEACH:
[abnormal behaviour => models]
 Use selected data about abnormal cognitive ability to
DEVELOP theories about normal cognitive processing.
TEST and EXTEND or
[models => abnormal behaviour]
 Use theories and models of cognitive processes to GUIDE assessment and
 diagnosis, and the developmental of evaluation and intervention programs
Use models of normal cognitive functioning to better
EXPLAIN the patterns of cognitive abnormality
UNDERSTAND and
LEARNING FROM CASE STUDIES:
 Case example from acquired phonological dyslexia: disorder that is in some after a brain injury

Models of reading propose separate “sounding-out” and “whole word recognition”

Therefore, expect to see cases of SELECTIVE impairment .

Led to identification of cases such as “Clive”: can sound familiar words but can’t sound on non-sense words. He lost the ability to link sound with words after the brain injury
Intensive study of cases (e.g. “Clive”) => refinement of theories of how reading works => develop treatment and remediation (of both acquired and developmental dyslexia)