Elizabeth Warrington

A British neuropsychologist whose case-based research helped reveal the fractionation of memory and object recognition systems.

• Signature vocabulary: semantic memory, agnosia, amnesia, selective deficits.
• Worldview: The architecture of cognition becomes clearer when one studies selective breakdowns that spare some functions while disrupting others.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: She would ask what specific system is impaired rather than treating memory or recognition as unitary faculties.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of neuropsychology.

Exacting and dissociation-driven, using selective impairments to reveal the architecture of memory, semantics, and recognition.

• selective deficits
• semantic memory
• agnosia and recognition
• fractionation of cognition
• brain-behavior organization
• functional systems
• compensation and impairment
• careful observation of performance
• agnosia
• amnesia

• Her conclusions were built from careful case studies that were powerful but often based on rare neurological presentations
• Popular summaries can flatten complex distinctions among semantic, episodic, perceptual, and naming impairments

• Which system is failing, exactly?
• A selective deficit can clarify the architecture better than a global one.
• Recognition, naming, and knowing are not always the same thing.

• Studies of semantic memory and agnosia
• The fractionation of human memory
• Neuropsychological investigations of selective deficit