Chapter 8 Sensorimotor Flashcards
Sensory feedback
Sensor signals that are produced by a response and are often used to guide the continuation of the response.
Posterior parietal association cortex
An area of association cortex that receives input from the visual, auditory, and somatosensory systems and is involved in the perception of spatial location and guidance of voluntary behavior.
Frontal eye field
A small area of prefrontal cortex that controls eye movements.
Apraxia
A disorder in which patients have great difficulty performing movements when asked to do so out of context but can readily perform them spontaneously in natural situations.
Contralateral neglect
A disturbance of the patient’s ability to respond to visual, auditory, and somatosensory stimuli on the side of the body opposite to a site of brain damage, usually the left side of the body following damage to the right parietal lobe.
Dorsolateral prefrontal association cortex
The area of the prefrontal association cortex that plays a role in the evaluation of external stimuli and the initiation of complex voluntary motor responses.
Secondary motor cortex
Areas of the cerebral cortex that receive much of their input from association cortex and send much of their output to primary motor cortex.
Supplementary motor area
The area of secondary motor cortex that is within and adjacent to the longitudinal fissure.
Premotor cortex
The area of secondary motor cortex that lies between the supplementary motor area and the lateral fissure.
Cingulate motor areas
Two small areas of secondary motor cortex located in the cingulate gurus of each hemisphere.
Mirror neurons
Neurons that fire both when a person makes a particular movement and when he person observes somebody else making the same movement.
Primary motor cortex
The cortex of the precentral gyrus, which is the major point of departure for motor signals descending from the cerebral cortex into lower levels of the sensorimotor system.
Somatotopic
Organized, like the primary somatosensory cortex, according to a map of the surface of the body.
Motor homunculus
The somatotopic map of the human primary motor cortex. (Homunculus means “little man.”)
Stereognosis
The process of identifying objects by touch.
Astereognosia
An inability to recognize objects by touch that is not attributable to a simple sensory deficit or to general intellectual impairment.
Dorsolateral corticorubrospinal tract
The descending motor tract that synapses in the red nucleus of the midbrain, decussates, and descends in the dorsolateral spinal white matter.
Betz cells
Large pyramidal neurons of the primary motor cortex that synapse directly on motor neurons in the lower regions of the spinal cord.
Posterior parietal association cortex involved in
Plays a role in integrating information about original positions of the parts of the body that are to be moved, positions of any external objects with which the body will interact, in directing behavior by providing spatial information, and in directing attention.
Dorsolateral corticospinal tract
The motor tract that leaves the primary motor cortex, descends to the medullary pyramids, decussates, and then descends in the contralateral dorsolateral spinal white matter.
Ventromedial corticospinal tract
The direct ventromedial motor pathway, which descends ipsilaterally from the primary motor cortex directly into the ventromedial areas of the spinal white matter.
Ventromedial cortico-brainstem-spinal tract
The indirect ventromedial motor pathway, which descends bilaterally from the primary motor cortex to several interconnected brain stem motor structures and then descends in the ventromedial portions of the spinal cord.
Tectum
The “roof,” or dorsal surface, of the Mesencephalon; it includes the superior and inferior colliculi.
Vestibular nucleus
The brain stem nucleus that receives information about balance from receptors in the semicircular canals.
