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Edith Freund Kaplan was born February 16, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York, to German immigrant parents, Louis and Fanny. She died September 3, 2009, in Massachusetts where she spent the major portion of her career. In the 85 years of her life, she left a legacy and scientific contributions that will live on in the hundreds she personally mentored and, beyond that, in the students of her trainees, who carry the torch, and in the field of brain-behavior study she helped create.
The current spate of interest in the workings of the human brain and the research emerging from functional and structural neuroimaging techniques owes much credit, often unrecognized, to her ideas and pioneering work with brain-injured patients. In the early days of her career, localization of behavior to discrete brain areas, based on the lesion-approach of the continental tradition, was the dominant goal. At that time, neuropsychology was not a recognized field of psychology but rather an interest area shared by psychologists, speech pathologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists, all attracted to this rediscovered and exhilarating frontier.
One of Kaplan's major contributions to the study of behavior was the notion that the end-product of performing a behavioral task was not as informative as the process by which that task was completed. What is actually taking place when one is asked a simple question, such as, "What is 15% of 60?â[euro] The correct answer means the task is within the patient's abilities, but what does the wrong answer mean? The apparent failure is one of calculation--or is it? Edith Kaplan, based on her earlier work in child development, where a cognitive task evolved to be performed in different ways depending on age, recognized that performing this seemingly simple task was the fruition of multiple complex activities at the level of the brain, including components of attention, working memory, language comprehension, speech production, and numerical aptitude. These fundamental cognitive domains determine the ability to understand the spoken instructions, maintain them in mind, access number facts, manipulate the calculation internally, and provide the verbal solution. Any one of these processes could be selectively impaired, leading to failure to get the correct answer. It seemed to Kaplan that why the task was failed...