認知神經心理學是認知心理學的一個分支，其目的是了解大腦的結構和功能如何與特定的心理過程相聯系。認知心理學是一門研究心理過程如何影響我們儲存和產生新記憶、產生語言、識別人和物體的認知能力，以及我們推理和解決問題的能力的科學。認知神經心理學特別強調研究腦損傷或神經疾病的認知影響，以期推斷出正常認知功能的模型。證據是基于對個別腦損傷患者的案例研究，這些患者的腦區存在缺陷，而患者則表現出雙重離解。雙解離包括兩名患者和兩項任務。一名患者在一項任務中受損，而另一名患者在另一項任務中正常，而另一名患者在第一項任務中正常，在另一項任務中受損。例如，患者A在閱讀印刷文字時表現較差，而在理解口語文字時表現正常;患者B在理解書面文字時表現正常，而在理解口語文字時表現較差。科學家可以解釋這些信息來解釋單詞理解是如何有一個單一的認知模塊的。從這些研究中，研究人員推斷大腦的不同區域是高度專門化的。認知神經心理學可與認知神經科學區分開來，認知神經科學也對腦損傷患者感興趣，但特別關注揭示認知過程背后的神經機制

Cognitive neuropsychology is a branch of cognitive psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. Cognitive psychology is the science that looks at how mental processes are responsible for our cognitive abilities to store and produce new memories, produce language, recognize people and objects, as well as our ability to reason and problem solve. Cognitive neuropsychology places a particular emphasis on studying the cognitive effects of brain injury or neurological illness with a view to inferring models of normal cognitive functioning. Evidence is based on case studies of individual brain damaged patients who show deficits in brain areas and from patients who exhibit double dissociations. Double dissociations involve two patients and two tasks. One patient is impaired at one task but normal on the other, while the other patient is normal on the first task and impaired on the other. For example, patient A would be poor at reading printed words while still being normal at understanding spoken words, while the patient B would be normal at understanding written words and be poor at understanding spoken words. Scientists can interpret this information to explain how there is a single cognitive module for word comprehension. From studies like these, researchers infer that different areas of the brain are highly specialised. Cognitive neuropsychology can be distinguished from cognitive neuroscience, which is also interested in brain damaged patients, but is particularly focused on uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes