Mental Lives: Case Studies in Cognition

Case Studies are familiar as problem-solving devices in business and in education, as well as having a traditional role in the teaching of medicine and as the psychoanalytic research. In experimental psychology, however, case studies have only recently resurfaced as a useful way of asking questions about the structure of the mind. Each of the chapters in this book describes a particular real person whom the investigator believes can tell us something important about the way the human mind develops and performs. Each chapter is written by an internationally known academic researcher in their chosen field in psychology. The cases range widely over developmental subjects, such as the girl born blind and the autistic child, to elderly patients who have had strokes or other brain damage that has oddly curtailed some previously intact cognitive skills such as drawing, writing or remembering.

The aim of this book is to bring these real life cases to life in a clear and relatively jargon-free way and so to illuminate how psychologists now use case-study evidence to approach central questions in cognition, such as the relation between brain structures and mental processes, and development of cognition. Together, the studies suggest the exciting flavour of current active research and offer new perspectives. Mental Lives is intended for use in the early stages of an undergraduate cognitive psychology course, and will also be of some use to students of developmental psychology and of neuropsychology.