What do double dissociations prove

Mind and language, 25 5 , — CrossRef Google Scholar. Dunn, J. The elusive dissociation. Discovering functionally independent mental processes: The principle of reversed associations.

Psychological Review, 95 1 , 91— Juola, K. Cohen, R. Plunkett Eds. East Sussex: Psychology Press. Google Scholar. Teuber, H. First, modularity fails to converge on a fixed set of exclusionary criteria that define pure cases. As a consequence, competing modular theories force perennial quests for purer cases, which simply perpetuates growth in the list of exclusionary criteria. The first problem leads, in part, to the second problem. Modularity fails to converge on a fixed set of pure cases.

The second failure perpetuates unending fractionation into more modules. What do double dissociations prove? Also, we thank Gary Barnes, Stan Smith, and Diane Williams for access to patients and help with conducting the studies. Copyright: Copyright Elsevier B. N2 - Brain damage may doubly dissociate cognitive modules, but the practice of revealing dissociations is predicated on modularity being true T. AB - Brain damage may doubly dissociate cognitive modules, but the practice of revealing dissociations is predicated on modularity being true T.

This statement is undoubtedly true. Since any two tasks, different enough to be called different, cannot recruit exactly the same mental functions in exactly the same way, it is inevitable that they will eventually yield a dissociation. This fact has begun to cause difficulties in memory research. But then dissociations were found between different implicit tests as well as between different explicit tests e. Similarly, dissociations have been found that draw into question whether unilateral visuospatial neglect is really a unitary disorder Halligan and Marshall, Such fractionations call into question the utility of dissociations as they seem to suggest that we will eventually need as many mental functions or modules or systems as there are tasks for humans to do.

As such, it would undermine the central aim of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuropsychology to explain human behaviour. Dunn and Kim Kirsner In addition to these five fundamental questions, the use of dissociations in different fields raises a number of other issues. These include, the relationship between dissociations of function and anatomical localisation as revealed, for example in PET or fMRI studies, the status of functional dissociations in cognitive psychology that do not involve deficits arising from brain damage, the implications of models containing two or more processing systems or modules for patterns of dissociations between different pairs of tasks, and the relationship between double dissociation and other inferential techniques such as additive factors Sternberg, , or dual-task methodology e.

We invited the contributors to the Forum in the present issue to address these and other questions relating to the fundamental logic of dissociations in cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.

What, if anything, can we infer from double dissociations? Understanding face recognition. British Journal of Psychology, , Cognitive neuropsychology and the study of reading.

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