11 - DLCNA Address | Ventures into Neuropsychology: Applying Cognitive Psychology to Clinical Problems

Our understanding of human cognition has increased greatly from neuropsychological research, which in turn has benefitted from the collaboration. I will describe four areas in which my own collaborative work has attempted to combine theoretical investigation with potential impact on patient care, including: studies of the classic amnesic syndrome that led to the development of errorless learning; research on patients with specific deficits in verbal short-term memory which revealed important implications for language acquisition more generally; studies on developmental amnesia which helped inform the classic distinction between semantic and episodic memory; and ongoing research on detecting accelerated long-term forgetting, during which the development of suitable clinical measures has illuminated surprising gaps in our understanding of the processes underlying forgetting. I conclude with a brief discussion regarding why such collaborations have been so fruitful.