This edited book addresses the important topic of child development in the last half of this century. The central focus of the book is the development of skilled motor actions by children, such as maintaining posture, walking, reaching, and grasping. The contents are based on the papers contributed in the first Mac Keith Meeting held at the Royal Society of Medicine in London in 1994. According to the preface to the book, the meeting aimed at making connections between levels of explanation, normal and pathological processes, basic and clinical research, and so on. Therefore, underlying themes are linking neurophysiological and psychological explanations, pre- and postnatal behavior, input and output processes, ballistic and graded movements, stability and variability, and so forth. In fact, the book succeeds in integrating findings from clinical and basic sciences to both normal and pathological motor development.

In recent years, edited books presenting unusual case studies of neuropsychological disorders have appeared in the literature with increasing frequency. In general, I have found these books to be fascinating, illustrating the seemingly endless variety of ways in which damage to the nervous system can affect the cognitive functioning and the day-to-day lives of previously normal individuals. These volumes, which focus on the uniqueness or specificity of an individual neuropsychological deficit rather than on the commonality of dysfunction across individuals, always include at least some cases that are unlike any that I have previously encountered and almost always present some real surprises—cases that seem to defy easy explanation in terms of existing theories. In these respects, Case Studies in the Neuropsychology of Memory, edited by Alan Parkin, is no exception. The descriptions of the cases reported in the 10 chapters of this book are unique and intriguing. They are presented as stand-alone case studies without any cross-referencing to other cases in the book, which highlights their uniqueness. There is little in the way of editorial intrusion. A brief introduction tells us what to expect, provides some rationale for the selection of cases that appear in the book, and includes a sentence or two of the accepted theory that may be challenged by the reported case studies.

The following is a correction for an error that occurred in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, Vol. 6, No. 3. The error occurred in the article titled “Personality change disorder in children and adolescents following traumatic brain injury,” pp. 279–289, by Max et al. On page 285, under the subheading “Injury Factors,” beginning with the second sentence in the first paragraph, the statement should read:

Visual inspection of the distribution of PC relative to lowest post-resuscitation GCS scores revealed that a cut-off of lowest post-resuscitation GCS score of 4 or less versus more than 4 yielded a sensitivity for a diagnosis of persistent PC of 9/14 (64.3%), specificity of 18/23 (78.3%), and a positive predictive value of 0.64 (9.14).

A cut-off of duration of impaired consciousness of 100 hr or less versus more than 100 hr yielded a sensitivity for a diagnosis of persistent PC of 11/14 (78.6%), specificity of 20/23 (87.0%), and a positive predictive value (PPV) of 0.79 (11/14).

Biased over 70 years of acquired preconceptions, I will discuss mainly Philosophical Debates, with occasional references to Consciousness Lost and Found. The bottom line is that neuropsychologists are more likely to benefit from Lost and Found than from Debates.

While the fact of litigation in neuropsychological assessment is about as subtle as a horse in a bedroom, it does not necessarily follow that the nature of malingering behaviors is also obvious or that the logic and techniques of malingering assessment have achieved “mature” validity. Despite the dramatic increase in studies on malingering in recent years, detection of malingering in head injury litigation continues to be a challenge for neuropsychologists. Numerous studies, most published since 1994, have attempted to search for the best technique for identifying malingering and/or malingerers. Unfortunately, this effort has been hampered by the lack of clinical data regarding the complexity and diversity of malingering behaviors themselves. In addition, the research is being conducted by clinical neuroscientists who, in various ways, are somewhat unsophisticated in their views of malingering detection statistics, paradigms and proofs (vs. forensic psychologists, maybe?).

This book contains an introduction by the editors and 15 chapters that are divided into three parts. Part I is entitled “Decoding Speech Sounds and Individual Words”; part II: “Lexical and Sentence-Level Semantics”; and Part III: “Discourse Processing and Problem Solving.” Each part concludes with a commentary by the editors. As these section titles show, the book provides evidence that the right hemisphere is involved with functions more commonly ascribed to the left hemisphere, namely, phonology, morphology, and semantics. In addition, several chapters are devoted to aspects of communicative competence commonly associated with right hemisphere specialization, such as discourse comprehension and the appreciation of emotional verbal messages. Previous works, such as Language, Aphasia, and the Right Hemisphere by Chris Code (1987), provide a more basic introduction to what was then known of right hemisphere communicative competence. The Beeman and Chiarello volume is directed towards a more sophisticated target audience familiar with neurolinguistic models of hemispheric contributions to language comprehension.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities (LD) are most frequently associated with childhood. This, of course, is because a child's job is to sit in a classroom, pay attention, and learn, and these are disorders that interfere with completing that job. Because these disorders are presumed due to brain dysfunction, it should be no surprise that both LD and ADHD continue to exert effects as children grow, go on to postsecondary education, and enter the job market. That is, developmental learning disorders, including LD and ADHD, do not “go away” when one becomes an adult. Several research groups have followed children with LD or ADHD into adulthood and have shown the persistence of symptoms and cognitive deficits, along with the toll that these difficulties take on psychosocial functioning, later academic performance, and vocational advancement.

Readers! Throw away your Shallice, and run to the bookstore for Austin! This magisterial work, an un-Zen-like 844 pages, divided into 158 chapters, a smorgasbord of reminiscences, data, and observations on Buddhism and neuroscience, interspersed with exercises in Zen meditation. Austin preserves by inclusion rather than selection the skepticism and dialectic that are the essence of Zen teaching, laying out what there is in all its eclectic richness, from Perky to Pavlov, from alpha rhythms to syzygy. In its scholarship and detachment it is a welcome antidote to the assertive fatuity of so much contemporary theory, offering the thesis, even if tacitly, that a subjectivism inferred from symptoms, e.g., hallucination, imagery and altered states, is preferable to an externalist model of cognition inferred from deficits.

This is an excellent clinical textbook by a group steeped in a quarter of a century's clinical experience and basic research experience. For members of INS who desire a rich and deep resource book on Tourette syndrome (this reviewer was trained to omit the possessive ‘s’ for all eponymous genetic designations) this one from the Yale Child Study Center provides the best choice. The organization of the book is also praiseworthy, as each chapter ends with a “look back” summary and a preview of the next chapter. It has the virtues of harmonious voices, coming as it does from a single center. The medical (including but not limited to neuropsychiatric) and biological sciences are presented in depth, clearly and thoughtfully, and well integrated with the clinical breadth of coverage of the core disorder and Tourette syndrome's (TS) comorbidities. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

The psychological and neuropsychological changes of aging and dementia have been a topic of study for decades, if not centuries. It is only more recently, however, that technological changes have allowed the biological processes triggering the changes of aging to be uncovered. The overlap between these two sciences, namely, the relationship between cognitive aging and the study of biological aging, is an emerging area of research. The study of aging, however, is confounded by the close association between aging and the development of particular diseases. Older people are far more likely than young people to suffer from multiple illnesses. Furthermore, older people are far more vulnerable to specific types of diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and dementia. The relationship between the onset of the aging process and the development of dementing disorders such as Alzheimer's disease is of particular interest.

This edition of Developmental Disabilities in Infancy and Childhood includes two edited volumes: Neurodevelopmental diagnosis and treatment and The spectrum of developmental disabilities. This series is a good clinical reference for developmental pediatricians and other medical subspecialists in this field; however, because of its medical orientation its general usefulness to pediatric neuropsychologists and child psychologists is limited.

The aim of this compact, well-organized volume is to guide the hopeful brain and behavioral sciences researcher through the entire proposal and funding process, from conceptualizing an initial project idea all the way to preparation of final reports and competing renewal applications. Particularly for the novice grant-seeker, this volume is a useful aid to cracking the often mystifying world of research funding opportunities.

It is a testimony to the genius of William James that scarce a lecture on attention passes without the speaker quoting him on the subject. This has, however, also been a cause for concern: do we really understand any more about this amorphous topic now, than we did when James wrote Principles of Psychology? It might occur to more jaundiced reviewers that the fact that James abandoned psychology completely after finishing this great book implies that he was beaten by the subject of attention, for, in many senses, the study of attention is at the very heart of the science of psychology. And if the founding genius of psychology could not crack the code of attention, is there any hope for the rest of us?

The significance of the human face in social interaction can hardly be overestimated. We rely primarily on facial appearance in discriminating between members of our species, but we also use the face to judge the age and gender of a person and to interpret his or her emotional state. We find certain faces pleasant or attractive, attribute personality characteristics to people such as intelligence or honesty based on physiognomy, and use facial cues to guess people's intentions and predict their behavior toward us. Similarly, we can gauge the effect of our words or actions on others by the feedback we receive from their faces. The face assumes a privileged role in social communication almost immediately after birth, suggesting that the neural systems underlying various facial behaviors are to a large extent innately specified and genetically determined.

Larry Leonard's new book, Children With Specific Language Impairment, has the potential to become the definitive text and scholarly resource for students, clinicians, and scientists concerned with these children. This six-part book (comprising 14 chapters) provides a complete, detailed, and even-handed review of the multidisciplinary research in this field.

Because the corresponding author was out of the office on business, corrections could not be made to Table 2 that appeared in JINS, 6:1, p. 24. In the table footnote, for F = 6.39, the degree of freedom should have been added: df = 1,36.

Laird Cermak was to become President of INS in February 2000, taking over the responsibilities for leading a scientific society he loved and served for over a quarter of a century. In many ways he embodied the very values the INS has always hoped to promote in excellence of scholarship, keen interest in behavioral neurosciences, and an easy and reflexive interdisciplinary citizenship. His name has been synonymous with a distinctive line of intellectual inquiry in amnesia and memory mechanisms for as long as I have been in neuropsychology myself.