Book reviews

Clinicians' Guide to Neuropsychological Assessment;2nd edition, edited by Rodney D Van der Ploeg

This is a valuable guide to clinical neuropsychologi-cal assessment. It emphasises both the practical issuesof assessment across clinical settings and the psycho-metric properties of the tests often used in these areas.The book covers its topics in some depth under threebroad sections: (1) fundamental elements of the assess-ment process; (2) special issues, settings and popu-lations; and (3) approaches and methodology. Thechapters on estimating pre-morbid intellectual func-tioning, geriatric assessment, and report writing areparticularly useful and the inclusion of thoughtful andpractical summary tables throughout the bookenhances it's readability. The depth of approach prob-

ably makes it a more appropriate book for the clini-cian with some neuropsychological experience than forthe novice and a primarily North American perspectiveis evident in the chapters which focus on the Hal-stead±Reitan Battery, the Minnesota Multi-phasic Per-sonality Inventory and computerised approaches totesting.

Overall, the clinical and psychometric foci of thebook make this a useful addition to the assessment lit-erature and one which I am sure will be of bene®t toany clinician within the ®eld of clinical neuropsychol-ogy.

Nigel KingWarneford Hospital, Iris Education Centre,

Oxford OX3 7JX, UK

PII: S0028-3932(00 )00051 -8

Memory for ActionsBy Johannes Engelkamp. Psychology Press, Hove,UK, 166 pp. Essays in Cognitive Psychology Series,1998. £22.50.

Why do we remember actions that we have per-formed better and more easily than actions we per-ceived or had reported to us? This well known fact hascome to be known as the enactment e�ect, and thisresearch question has produced a substantial body ofexperimental evidence and forms the basis for Engel-kamp's essay, in which he describes a series of exper-iments which began in the early 1980s. There are con-sistent di�erences in quality of recollection, quality ofrelational encoding and signi®cance of motor processesbetween subject performed tasks (SPTs) and verbal

tasks (VTs), with SPTs being far better remembered

than VTs. Engelkemp proposes that enactment of

actions as an encoding process produces a rich, multi-

modal memory encoding, which has sensory, concep-

tual and motor phases. Whilst the aim of this research,

to develop a general theory of episodic memory, is

laudable, it is not so clear that the cognitive method-

ology used is likely to be the most e�ective way of

approaching this aim. The lack of an evolutionary per-

spective is frustrating Ð it is hard to see why memory

of our own actions would not be important to us, par-

ticularly in comparison with an arti®cial verbal list

learning paradigm. The lack of discussion of the links

with neuroscience ®ndings is also frustrating, as many

experiments with animals, and observations of

patients, touch on the issues that Engelkamp discusses.

Neuropsychologia 38 (2000) 1550±1551

www.elsevier.com/locate/neuropsychologia