Neuropsychology Exam Advice The exam is very straightforward. There are six questions and you have to answer two. If you look at past exam papers you will see that there are no trick questions. Between them the main and resit exams cover the areas I have taught. I will not ask you about some minor and obscure aspect of a topic. I will ask you “big” questions which have been well covered in lecturers. What I do not recommend is gambling on specific questions appearing and therefore preparing only two. A group of students did this year before last and came unstuck. It was not a pretty sight! Topics I have covered are: 1. Amnesia – explanation of Amnesic Syndrome in terms of (1) memory structures and (2) memory processes. 2. Visual Object Agnosia. The main theme here was the way that visual object agnosias can be attributed either to perceptual deficits or memory deficits and the way that each of these can be fractionated further. 3. Plasticity and rehabilitation. I covered two main areas: general aspects of rehabilitation and some discussion of single case designs and the plasticity of the neural system. 4. Spoken Language Impairments. These divided into comprehension deficits and output deficits. Again, in each case we looked at how each of these could be caused by a breakdown in component subsystems (this theme of fractionation is consistent through the different topic areas). 5. Visuo-spatial Neglect. Here we looked at the phenomenon and explanations for it. 6. Acquired dyslexia. Do not confuse this with developmental dyslexia. We looked at a modular explanation of the acquired dyslexias (routes to reading) and a connectionist explanation and observed how different these two explanations are. In addition there is one question on the exam about single case studies. You need to know in some detail the more important case studies you have come across while doing the unit. Finally, I can’t ask you questions which overlap too much with the assignment you did. Chris Sterling May 2005.