The paradigm of double dissociation is of considerable historical importance. The term, first proposed by Hans-Lukas Teuber (1955), refers to a situation in which a lesion of brain area A impairs function 1 but not function 2, while a lesion of brain area B produces the reverse pattern. Teuber argued that double dissociations were “needed for conclusive proof (p. 283)” of localization of function. For many years, observations of double dissociations were felt to permit strong inferences about localization of discrete cognitive abilities. Familiar (albeit simplified) examples of such dissociations include expressive vs. receptive language (Broca’s area vs. Wernicke’s area) and verbal memory vs. visual memory (left temporal lobe vs. right temporal lobe). Substantial advances in the development of clinical neuropsychology were supported by demonstrations of other dissociations.
The concept was adopted and subsequently modified by cognitive neuropsychologists who produced elegant...
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Caplan, B. (2018). Double Dissociation. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_9280
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