Publisher's Synopsis
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 being the mainstay of psychoanalytic research. In experimental psychology, however, case studies have only recently resurfaced as a useful way of asking questions about the structure of 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 skill such as drawing, writing and remembering.;The aim of the book is to bring these real cases to life in a clear and relatively jargon-free way and so illuminate the way that psychologists now use case-study evidence to approach central questions in cognition, such as the relation between brain structures and mental processes, and the development of cognition. Together, they 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 use to students of developmental psychology and of neuropsychology.
