Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2014, 55, 187–188

DOI: 10.1111/sjop.12135

Editorial New perspectives in neuropsychology 3 € ASTRI JOHANSEN LUNDERVOLD,1 KRISTINE BEATE WALHOVD,2 JERKER RONNBERG and KJETIL SUNDET2 1

Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway 3 Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Link€ oping University, Link€ oping, Sweden 2

It has been an honor and privilege to serve as guest editors (Lundervold with Walhovd and Sundet as co-editors) of the present issue of Scandinavian Journal of Psychology in honor of Professor Ivar Reinvang. He has throughout his extensive career repeatedly challenged conceptual and methodological aspects of neuropsychology, and by this substantially contributed with new perspectives of importance for neuropsychological research and clinical practice. Thanks to the authors of the present collection of papers, this special issue should illustrate how Ivar’s interdisciplinary approach has inspired and influenced neuropsychology during the last decades. Ivar received his professional education in psychology at the University of Oslo in the late 1960s, obtaining his master’s from the Department of Neurosurgery. He then spent two years as a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA. In his paper “A lifetime in neuropsychology – perspectives on an era”, he describes how these early years of training had a profound effect on how he came to view neuropsychology. In 1973, Ivar became a director of the “Institute for Aphasia and Stroke” at Sunnaas Rehabilitation Hospital. Here, he developed assessment tools and training programs, and in doing so, this placed clinical neuropsychology at the core of neurorehabilitation. Professor Andrew Kertesz, presenting a paper on “Primary progressive aphasia” in this issue, was one of those who inspired Ivar to construct a Norwegian aphasia test. Ivar completed his doctoral thesis in 1983, and his book on “Aphasia and Brain Organization” was published in 1985. In that book, he suggested a model of the brain as an organized complex system. As Klaus Willmes and colleagues state in their paper on “Where numbers meets words,” “Reinvang took aphasia as his test case when providing both empirical data and theoretical arguments for a network perspective on higher brain functions.” This perspective, which today is well established, has clearly influenced Ivar’s teaching, research and clinical work. As a director at Sunnaas Rehabilitation Hospital, Ivar inspired students and colleagues, some of whom have deeply influenced neuropsychology in Norway through their research and clinical practice. In this issue, they are represented by Kjetil Sundet, one of the editors, Arnstein Finset, presenting a paper on neuropsychological aspects of talk-in-interaction, and Nils Inge Landrø, presenting a paper on personalized treatment of depression. Ivar’s impact is also today well documented by the high © 2014 Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

number of employed psychologists and by the relevance of clinical neuropsychology in many of the rehabilitation fields at the hospital. In 1983 Ivar moved to a position as a clinical neuropsychologist at the National Hospital (Rikshospitalet) in Oslo. New patient groups challenged him to develop and translate assessment procedures. These procedures became standard at the hospital, and have had an immense impact on neuropsychological assessment nationwide. One of the translated tests, the California Verbal Learning Test, is included as the main instrument in Astri Lundervold and colleagues’ study on age-related changes in memory function. As part of the assessment procedure, Ivar also included registration of Event Related Potentials (ERP). This method has been part of several research projects, for example, in studies of patients with focal frontal lobe lesions, reviewed here in the paper by Anne-Kristin Solbakk and Marianne Løvstad. A third major move in Ivar’s professional career took place in 1993. As a full-time professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, he developed cognitive neuroscience into being one of the Department’s strongest research fields. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and information about genetic markers were included as part of his research, with a main focus on cognitive aging and early signs of dementia. By his interdisciplinary approach he once more contributed substantially, and was honored as a group leader at the Center for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in 2011/2012 on “Cognition in aging – contributions of cognitive neuroscience and cognitive genetics.” His work, his generous inclusion and advices continued to inspire PhD students. Three of his former PhD students, Kristine Walhovd, Anders Fjell and Thomas Espeseth, contribute with a paper on cognitive and brain pathology in aging in the present issue. Here, they argue for the importance of a “multidimensional systems-vulnerability rather than a simple ‘hypothetical biomarker’ model of age-associated cognitive decline and dementia.” Ivar’s collaboration with experts in genetics is extensive, illustrated here by Stephanie LeHellard and Vidar Steen’s paper on cognitive genetics. Three papers document his international collaboration. Two of those focus on effects of ApoE genotypes on aging. Lars Nyberg and Alireza Salami from the Betula study in Sweden relate these effects to MRI measures of white matter microstructure, and Pamela Greenwood and Raja Parasuraman from George Mason University, VA, test a hypothesis of neuronal plasticity in carriers of the E4 allele in a paper

188 A. J. Lundervold et al. with Reinvang and Espeseth as co-authors. Last, but not least, Ivar’s interest in neurodegenerative disorders is represented by a paper on impulsivity in patients with Parkinson’s disease who are carriers of different COMT genotypes, authored by David Ziegler at the University of California, Suzanne Corkin at Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center in Boston and coworkers.

© 2014 Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Scand J Psychol 55 (2014)

By these introductory remarks, we hope that the present issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology in honor of Professor Ivar Reinvang will inspire and guide us to join his hope “to see a continuing effort to place cognitive neuropsychology as a central conceptual and methodological aspect of interdisciplinary neuroscience.”

New perspectives in neuropsychology.

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