Module 03
Neuropsychology
Tools for brain–behaviour reasoning and the classic experimental paradigms, so that students can run the task and see their own pattern of responses before they read about the effect in a textbook.
12 tools published
Tools in this module
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Double Dissociation Detective
Six fictional case files, each giving one or two people, two tasks and a fictional control group for every task. Students return a verdict on each file - not enough evidence, a general severity difference, a single dissociation, a double dissociation, or a crossover the tasks cannot support - and receive feedback built from the numbers rather than from a stored answer key. One file has a 58-point raw gap that disappears once each score is read against its own controls; another changes verdict as a test-length slider moves without a single score changing.
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Lesion-Symptom Inference Trap
One fictional case invites a localisation inference, and then six complications arrive one at a time: the lesion is larger than its label, it follows a vascular territory, some affected tissue is not damaged, the person's premorbid level and language organisation are unknown, there is a second older lesion, and the original dissociation depended on how comprehension was probed. A schematic map redraws at each step and a gauge compares the learner's stated confidence with the most the evidence can carry.
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Network Disconnection Mapper
A deliberately simplified fictional network of five regions and six pathways, with four tasks that each need a particular route through it. Students damage a region or cut a pathway and watch which tasks notice. Two tasks have a weaker second route, so some damage makes them effortful and error-prone rather than impossible, and several different single failures turn out to produce exactly the same behavioural profile.
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Visual Neglect Laboratory
Line bisection, cancellation and copying a scene, run on five fictional profiles: no difficulty, left neglect organised around the viewer, left neglect organised around each object, left visual field loss without neglect, and both together. An examiner prompt can be switched on and off. The copying task separates neglect from field loss cleanly, and separates the two kinds of neglect from each other.
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Visual Field Defect Mapper
Six points on a schematic visual pathway - optic nerve, chiasm, tract, the two halves of the radiation, and occipital cortex. For each, the learner ticks which quadrants of which eye's field they expect to go dark before revealing the textbook mapping, and is marked cell by cell. The challenge runs the inference backwards: given a complete homonymous defect, which points on the pathway are compatible? Four of eight are.
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Memory Systems Detective
Five fictional memory profiles across seven control-referenced measures, and five claims about separable memory systems. For every claim on every profile the learner decides whether the profile supports it, counts against it, or cannot decide it, and receives an explanation built from that profile's own numbers. Of the twenty-five cells, twelve cannot be decided - and the retrieval-versus-storage claim is never supported anywhere.
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Aphasia Profile Comparator
Six fictional language profiles on six original measures - fluency of spontaneous speech, understanding, repetition, naming, reading aloud and writing. The learner puts any two side by side, predicts which single measure does most to separate them, and is marked against the arithmetic. One profile fits no textbook pattern, which is the subject of the challenge.
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Executive Function Task Laboratory
Two staged experiments on four original executive tasks and six capacities. In the first, learners predict which processes each task requires and then reveal the model's weights - no task loads on fewer than five of the six. In the second, six capacity sliders and a strategy slider show that reducing inhibition and reducing processing speed both make the colour-word task the lowest score, and that a summary score can hide a complete reversal of the speed-accuracy trade-off.
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Split-Brain Laboratory
Two staged experiments about the logic of a lateralised trial. In the first, learners build a trial - item, visual field, response channel, corpus callosum - commit to a prediction and run it, until they have found a combination the section changes and one it does not. In the second, the trial that classically fails is fixed and the five conditions it depends on can be switched off one at a time, turning a famous finding into an ordinary one. Nothing is presented to a visual field; the tool reports what a deliberately simplified routing model gives.
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Face Recognition Detective
A six-component model of recognising a person, with a face route and a voice route that converge. In the first experiment learners place a difficulty at one component and read the profile of seven task outcomes it produces. In the second they work backwards from six invented profiles - one of which fits two components because the control task was not administered, and one of which fits none at all - and receive the alternative explanations that come before any component.
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Assessment Battery Builder
Three fictional referrals, a ninety-minute session and seventeen generically described task types. Learners tick tasks and watch four checks update live - converging evidence on the referral question, a domain expected to be intact, the context measures that referral needs, and whether the battery fits the session. Submitting produces a verdict in two halves: what the battery could say and what it could not. The tool evaluates the design of a battery and never scores a person.
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Recovery and Plasticity Simulator
Two staged experiments on what a rising score after an injury can establish. The first draws five simulated people over twenty-four months with individual variation and measurement noise, so there is no single recovery curve. The second takes one trained score apart into starting capacity, restitution, relearning, compensation and practice, and compares it with a task the person has never practised - two preset routes reach the same trained score of 86 with untrained scores of 80 and 71.
What this module covers
These are the topics the module was planned around. The tools above cover them; the list is kept so the intended scope stays visible and so a contributor proposing a new tool can see what is already here.
- Classic attention tasks Runnable versions of Stroop-type interference and spatial cueing paradigms, with the student's own reaction times summarised once the block ends.
- Working memory and span Span procedures that make the capacity limit something a student meets directly rather than reads about as a number.
- Dissociation logic Single and double dissociations, and precisely what each one licenses you to conclude about separable processes.
- Executive function Set-shifting and inhibition tasks, with the switch cost calculated from the student's own responses rather than quoted from a paper.
- Interpreting deficits Why performance on any one task rarely maps onto a single region, and why network and disconnection accounts are often the better explanation of a pattern.
A note on timed and animated tasks
Reaction-time paradigms are the hardest kind of tool to make accessible, because the timing pressure that makes the task work is also a barrier for some students. Tools in this module will offer a keyboard route through every task, an untimed practice mode, and a version of the underlying idea that can be explored without completing the task at all — so a student who cannot do the timed version still meets the concept.
Nothing here diagnoses or assesses anyone. These are demonstrations of paradigms, run on a laptop in uncontrolled conditions, and the tools will say so on the page. A pattern of responses from one person on one afternoon is not evidence about that person's brain.
Building one of these
All five topics above are open. If you teach neuropsychology and have a demonstration you already run by hand, turning it into a page here makes it reusable by everyone else. The contributing guide covers the folder layout, the shared interactive shell and the accessibility checks a tool needs to pass before it is merged.