Neuropsychologia

About Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia: Journal Overview

Neuropsychologia is an international, interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal devoted to experimental and theoretical work that advances understanding of human cognition and behavior from a neuroscience perspective. Established in 1963 and published by Elsevier (originally by Pergamon Press), it is one of the longest-running journals in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, with continuous publication spanning more than six decades (sources: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychologia, accessed October 2026).

The journal's official statement of purpose describes a venue for studies that directly connect brain function with cognitive processes — spanning perception, attention and consciousness, action and motor control, executive functions and cognitive control, memory, language, and emotion and social cognition. Work using functional and structural neuroimaging, cognitive electrophysiology, and brain stimulation is particularly encouraged when it moves cognitive and psychological theory forward (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/about/aims-and-scope, accessed October 2026).

Neuropsychologia occupies a distinctive position among brain-and-behavior journals. It has a long tradition of publishing lesion-deficit research — studies of patients with focal brain damage that reveal how specific regions support cognition — and the publisher states that such work remains squarely within the journal's remit. At the same time, the journal has embraced modern cognitive neuroscience methods, and its recent volumes mix patient studies, neuroimaging experiments, electrophysiology, and computational modeling (sources: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/about/aims-and-scope; sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia, accessed October 2026).

Its standing is reflected in citation metrics. The journal's 2020 Journal Impact Factor was 3.139 (Journal Citation Reports, via Wikipedia), and more recent estimates place the 2024 value at approximately 2 on the JCR scale (ooir.org JCR rankings) and 2.09 on the Scopus-based impact score (resurchify.com, computed 2025). SCImago places it in the second quartile (Q2) of its subject categories, with an SJR of 0.849 and an h-index of 236 (sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychologia; ooir.org; resurchify.com/impact/details/18009, accessed October 2026). Metric values are updated annually and should be checked on current ranking sources before citing.

History of Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia was founded in 1963 by Pergamon Press, the Oxford-based scientific publisher built by Robert Maxwell into one of the world's largest academic journal houses (source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychologia). The journal's launch coincided with the formative years of neuropsychology as a discipline: the 1960s saw the first systematic studies of split-brain patients, the rise of dichotic listening research on hemispheric asymmetry, and growing clinical interest in the cognitive consequences of focal brain lesions.

For nearly three decades the journal grew under the Pergamon imprint. In March 1991, Maxwell sold Pergamon Press to Elsevier for £440 million, and Neuropsychologia became an Elsevier title — the imprint it carries to this day (source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Press, accessed October 2026).

Across its history, the journal has mirrored the methodological evolution of its field. Early volumes were dominated by paper-and-pencil neuropsychological testing and lesion studies. The 1970s and 1980s brought landmark contributions on attention, memory, and hemispheric specialization. From the 1990s onward, functional neuroimaging (PET, then fMRI), EEG/ERP, and later brain stimulation and computational approaches joined the methodological mix — a trajectory visible in the journal's most-cited papers, which range from Oldfield's 1971 Edinburgh handedness inventory to modern neuroimaging meta-analyses (sources: api.crossref.org records for ISSN 0028-3932, sorted by citation count, accessed October 2026).

The journal is currently led by Editor-in-Chief Stephan Hamann of Emory University, supported by section editors covering the journal's core domains and a large international editorial advisory board (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/about/editorial-board, accessed October 2026). Elsevier reports the journal's current editorial timeline as approximately 7 days to first decision, 83 days to decision after peer review, 193 days from submission to acceptance, and 2 days from acceptance to online publication (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia, accessed October 2026).

Leadership and Editorial Team

According to the journal's official editorial-board page (accessed October 2026), the Editor-in-Chief of Neuropsychologia is Stephan Hamann, Professor of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA (Department of Psychology, 36 Eagle Row, Atlanta, GA 30322). Hamann has been at Emory since 1996; his research investigates the neural basis of emotion, memory, and their interaction, combining neuroimaging and neuropsychological approaches, and he earned his PhD at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Endel Tulving (sources: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/about/editorial-board; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephan_Hamann, accessed October 2026).

The journal uses a section-editor model, with pairs of editors handling the major domains:

• Action & Motor Control: Deborah Serrien (University of Nottingham) and Peter Weiss (Research Centre Jülich)
• Attention and Consciousness: Nele Demeyere (University of Oxford)
• Emotion & Social Neuroscience: Stephan Hamann (Emory University) and Justin Minue Kim (Sungkyunkwan University)
• Executive Function & Cognitive Control: Kai Hwang (University of Iowa) and Diane Swick (VA Northern California Health Care System)
• Language: Valentina Bambini (IUSS Pavia) and Swathi Kiran (Boston University)
• Memory: Chris Bird (University of Sussex) and R. Shayna Rosenbaum (York University)
• Perception: Holly Bridge (University of Oxford) and Micah Murray (Lausanne University Hospital)

Monika Harvey (University of Glasgow) serves as Lead Special Issue Editor. The Editorial Advisory Board comprises several dozen senior figures across 15 countries — including Ralph Adolphs (Caltech), Daniel Ansari (Western University), David Badre (Brown), Simon Baron-Cohen (Cambridge), Marlene Behrmann (Pittsburgh), Maurizio Corbetta (Padua), Sabine Kastner (Princeton), Eleanor Maguire (UCL), Morris Moscovitch (Toronto), Alex Martin (NIMH), and Giuseppe Vallar (Milan-Bicocca), among others (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/about/editorial-board, accessed October 2026).

Aims & Scope

The following is a paraphrase of the journal's official aims-and-scope statement (sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/about/aims-and-scope, accessed October 2026). Neuropsychologia seeks experimental and theoretical contributions that link brain function to cognition and behavior. Its core territory covers perception, attention and consciousness, action and motor control, executive functions and cognitive control, memory, language, and emotion and social cognition. The journal explicitly encourages submissions using functional and structural neuroimaging, cognitive electrophysiology, and brain stimulation — provided the work advances psychological or cognitive theory, not merely reports a method applied.

The journal is explicit about what it does and does not want:

• Lesion-deficit studies — the journal's historical backbone — remain highly appropriate.
• Animal studies are welcome when they have a direct, explicitly stated bearing on understanding the brain basis of human cognition and behavior.
• Purely behavioral studies in neurologically healthy participants are generally not appropriate unless the findings have a direct and significant bearing on the neural mechanisms or systems supporting cognition and behavior.
• Primarily descriptive clinical studies, studies whose main goal is to characterize a clinical disorder, and studies evaluating therapeutic interventions are not appropriate for the journal.
• Special issues and review papers are published regularly to provide authoritative surveys of topics of major current interest.

In practical terms, Neuropsychologia is the journal for researchers who want to publish brain-based explanations of cognitive phenomena — whether through patient work, imaging, stimulation, or theory — rather than purely behavioral psychology or purely clinical description (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/about/aims-and-scope, accessed October 2026).

Editorial Process, Article Types, and Submission

Manuscripts are submitted through the journal's online portal on the Elsevier/ScienceDirect journal page. The journal follows a single-anonymized peer-review process: submissions are first assessed by the editors for suitability, and those deemed suitable are typically sent to a minimum of two independent reviewers for expert assessment of scientific quality. The editors make the final accept/reject decision. Authors may submit one formal appeal of an editorial decision under Elsevier's appeal policy (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/publish/guide-for-authors, accessed October 2026).

Article types accepted (per the official Guide for Authors, accessed October 2026):

• Research Reports — the journal's core article type; up to 20 printed journal pages or about 17,000 words.
• Reviews and Perspectives — critical, comprehensive surveys of topics of major current interest; up to 30 printed journal pages or 26,000 words.
• Viewpoints — opinion pieces offering a personal view of contemporary theories and ideas; typically invited by the Editor; limited to 2,000 words and 10 references, and generally made immediately freely available. Pre-submission enquiries go to the Editor-in-Chief.
• Commentaries — short pieces, typically invited, accompanying articles in the journal; limited to 1,000 words and 10 references.
• Letters to the Editor — high-quality short contributions of no more than 500 words and 5 references; if directed at a published paper, the original authors are invited to respond, and both are published together.

Current editorial timelines (as displayed by Elsevier, accessed October 2026): about 7 days from submission to first decision, 83 days from submission to decision after review, 193 days from submission to acceptance, and 2 days from acceptance to online publication. The journal's recent special-issue calls include collections on pattern separation and pattern completion, eyetracking combined with other neuroscience methods, sensory illusions and brain information processing, spatial navigation, and a festschrift honoring the memory research of Eleanor Maguire (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia, accessed October 2026).

Like all Elsevier journals, Neuropsychologia requires authors to follow standard publishing-ethics policies: declaration of competing interests, funding-source disclosure, a generative-AI use declaration when AI tools assisted manuscript preparation, and adherence to authorship criteria. Preprints are permitted under the submission declaration (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/publish/guide-for-authors, accessed October 2026).

Landmark Papers and Scientific Influence

Few journals can claim a single paper cited more than 30,000 times. Neuropsychologia can. The following landmark papers — all with DOIs individually verified through Crossref (api.crossref.org, accessed October 2026) — illustrate the journal's influence across six decades:

• Oldfield, R.C. (1971). The assessment and analysis of handedness: The Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia, 9(1), 97–113. doi:10.1016/0028-3932(71)90067-4 — With over 31,000 citations recorded by Crossref, this is one of the most-cited papers in all of psychology and neuroscience. The Edinburgh Handedness Inventory it introduced remains the standard questionnaire for assessing hand preference in research worldwide.
• Stern, Y. (2009). Cognitive reserve. Neuropsychologia, 47(10), 2015–2028. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.03.004 — A foundational review of the cognitive reserve hypothesis, which proposes that lifetime experiences (education, occupation, leisure) build neural resilience against age- and disease-related brain changes; cited over 2,800 times.
• Denckla, M.B., & Rudel, R.G. (1976). Rapid "automatized" naming (R.A.N.): Dyslexia differentiated from other learning disabilities. Neuropsychologia, 14(4), 471–479. doi:10.1016/0028-3932(76)90075-0 — Introduced rapid automatized naming, the timed color/object/letter-naming task that became a cornerstone predictor of reading disability.
• Rizzolatti, G., Riggio, L., Dascola, I., & Umiltá, C. (1987). Reorienting attention across the horizontal and vertical meridians: Evidence in favor of a premotor theory of attention. Neuropsychologia, 25(1), 31–40. doi:10.1016/0028-3932(87)90041-8 — A key statement of the premotor theory of attention, linking spatial attention to the brain's action-planning machinery.
• Milner, A.D., & Goodale, M.A. (2008). Two visual systems re-viewed. Neuropsychologia, 46(3), 774–785. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.10.005 — A revisiting of the authors' influential dorsal ("vision for action") versus ventral ("vision for perception") streams framework, grounded in neuropsychological patient evidence.
• Vallar, G., & Perani, D. (1986). The anatomy of unilateral neglect after right-hemisphere stroke lesions: A clinical/CT-scan correlation study in man. Neuropsychologia, 24(5), 609–622. doi:10.1016/0028-3932(86)90001-1 — A classic lesion-anatomy study of hemispatial neglect that helped map the cortical and subcortical structures whose damage produces the disorder.

Beyond individual papers, OpenAlex records roughly 12,070 works published in Neuropsychologia attracting about 818,909 citations in total, reflecting the journal's deep citation footprint (source: OpenAlex source record, via journalsworld.com/neuropsychologia/, retrieved 2026-10-03).

Neuropsychologia's Role in the Field

Neuropsychologia helped define neuropsychology as a bridge discipline. In its early decades, the journal was the primary outlet for the lesion method — the logic that a cognitive ability lost after damage to a particular brain region reveals that region's contribution to the ability. Classic papers on hemispatial neglect, apraxia, agnosia, and amnesia established a template: careful behavioral description of patients, anatomical localization of lesions, and inference about normal brain organization. That tradition continues, but the journal's pages now also carry the methods that transformed the field — positron emission tomography in the 1980s and 1990s, functional MRI from the late 1990s, event-related potentials and magnetoencephalography, transcranial magnetic and electrical stimulation, and increasingly multivariate and computational modeling of brain-behavior relationships (sources: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/about/aims-and-scope; Crossref citation-sorted records for ISSN 0028-3932, accessed October 2026).

The journal's special-issue program is a significant part of its identity. Recent and forthcoming collections — on pattern separation and completion, on combining eyetracking with neuroimaging and neuromodulation, on sensory illusions, on spatial navigation, and a tribute to Eleanor Maguire's memory research — show an editorial strategy of convening the field around timely questions rather than only processing unsolicited submissions. For authors, the practical takeaway is that Neuropsychologia rewards work that speaks to mechanism: a brain measure tied to a cognitive theory, a patient finding that constrains a model, or a method applied to answer a psychological question — rather than description alone (sources: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia; sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/publish/guide-for-authors, accessed October 2026).

Impact and Metrics

The following metrics come from the sources named; JCR (Clarivate) and Scopus-based figures are different indicators and should not be mixed:

Reading the numbers: Neuropsychologia's citation influence peaked in the mid-2010s (resurchify notes a 2014 impact-score high of 3.67) and has moderated since — a pattern shared by many established specialty journals as the field's publication volume grew. The journal's long citation tail (h-index 236) reflects six decades of heavily used papers rather than a few recent hits (sources: resurchify.com/impact/details/18009; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychologia, accessed October 2026).

Open Access and APC

Neuropsychologia is a subscription journal with a hybrid open access option — it is not a fully open access journal. OpenAlex, drawing on DOAJ-reported list prices, lists open-access list prices of US$3,300 / €3,090 / £2,640 / ¥409,300; these are reported list prices, not a fee quotation, and current charges, taxes, waivers, and eligibility should be confirmed with the publisher before submitting (source: OpenAlex source record, via journalsworld.com/neuropsychologia/, retrieved 2026-10-03). Authors should also check institutional and funder agreements with Elsevier, which frequently cover or discount open access fees.

Neuropsychologia at a Glance

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Neuropsychologia?

Neuropsychologia is an international interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, published by Elsevier, devoted to experimental and theoretical research linking brain function with human cognition and behavior. It covers perception, attention, memory, language, executive function, emotion, and related domains, with a historic strength in lesion-deficit studies (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia/about/aims-and-scope).

When was Neuropsychologia founded, and who publishes it?

The journal was established in 1963 by Pergamon Press and has been published by Elsevier since Pergamon's sale to Elsevier in March 1991 (sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychologia; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Press).

Who is the current Editor-in-Chief of Neuropsychologia?

According to the journal's official editorial-board page (accessed October 2026), the Editor-in-Chief is Stephan Hamann, Professor of Psychology at Emory University, whose research focuses on the neural basis of emotion and memory.

What are the ISSNs of Neuropsychologia?

Print ISSN 0028-3932 and online ISSN 1873-3514 (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia).

What is Neuropsychologia's impact factor?

The 2020 Journal Impact Factor was 3.139; recent estimates place the 2024 value at approximately 2 (JCR scale) or 2.09 (Scopus-based impact score). SCImago ranks it Q2. Figures change annually — verify current values before citing (sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychologia; ooir.org; resurchify.com).

What types of papers does Neuropsychologia publish?

Research Reports (up to ~17,000 words), Reviews and Perspectives (up to 26,000 words), invited Viewpoints (2,000 words), Commentaries (1,000 words), and Letters to the Editor (500 words), plus regular special issues (source: official Guide for Authors).

How long does peer review take at Neuropsychologia?

Elsevier reports roughly 7 days to first decision, 83 days to a decision after review, and 193 days from submission to acceptance, with online publication about 2 days after acceptance (source: sciencedirect.com/journal/neuropsychologia).

Is Neuropsychologia open access?

It is a subscription journal with a hybrid open access option. Reported OA list prices are around US$3,300, but confirm current charges with the publisher (sources: OpenAlex source record; Elsevier OA pages).

What is the most famous paper published in Neuropsychologia?

R.C. Oldfield's 1971 paper "The assessment and analysis of handedness: The Edinburgh inventory" (doi:10.1016/0028-3932(71)90067-4), cited more than 31,000 times — the handedness questionnaire it introduced is still the field standard (source: Crossref).

Does Neuropsychologia publish animal studies?

Yes — animal studies are welcome provided they have a direct and explicitly specified impact on understanding the brain basis of human cognition and behavior. Purely behavioral studies in healthy humans and primarily descriptive clinical studies are generally out of scope (source: official aims and scope).

Profile compiled October 2026 from the journal's official Elsevier/ScienceDirect pages, Crossref DOI records, and the secondary sources listed below. Editorial teams, metrics, and policies change over time — always verify current figures on the journal's official pages before citing or acting on them.

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