Cognitive neuropsychiatry is a new field of cognitive psychology which seeks to learn more about the normal operation of high-level aspects of cognition such as belief formation, reasoning, decision making, theory of mind, and pragmatics by studying people in whom such processes are abnormal. So far, the high-level cognitive process most widely studied in cognitive neuropsychiatry has been belief formation, investigated by examining people with delusional beliefs. This paper describes some of the forms of delusional belief that have been examined from this perspective and offers a general two-deficit cognitive-neuropsychiatric account of delusional belief.
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