History of Italian Neuropsychology

Early Italian clinicians and researchers dedicated their work to human neuropsychology mainly through analysis of variations of cognitive and behavioral functions caused by brain damage. The systematic development of neuropsychology in Italy started in the early 1960s in Milan with the neurologist Ennio De Renzi and his collaborators (mainly Luigi A. Vignolo, early on) in the Clinic of Nervous and Mental Diseases. The “Milan group” investigated several neuropsychological deficits caused by focal hemispheric lesions in human brain-damaged patients, developing standardized tests and advanced statistical methods applied to the clinical diagnosis and the rehabilitation of aphasia. It first used the new imaging techniques (CT scan) in the 1970s to correlate lesion sites with behavioral deficits. Since then, neuropsychology and neuropsychological research, both basic and applied, have developed extensively in other parts of Italy and include clinical diagnosis and rehabilitation of patients with brain damage or dysfunction throughout the life span.