Neuropsychology Fundamentals (Dr Feifer) Flashcards
Four Lobes of Cerebral Cortex
Occipital, Parietal, Temporal, Frontal
Occipital Lobe
Is dedicated to visual processing. Includes the visual cortex where the dorsal (spatial/where) and ventral (visual/what) streams originate. 
Parietal lobe
Processes sensory, and spatial information, and is the main receptive area for the sense of touch. It also has areas involved with higher level language processing.
Temporal lobe
Houses language and memory functions. It is also involved with auditory and visual processing. 
Frontal lobe
Handles executive functions, such as planning, working memory, and self monitoring, as well as reasoning, language, and motor planning functions.
Basal ganglia
Control of voluntary motor movements, procedural, learning, routine behaviors, cognition, and emotion. 
Limbic system
Includes the amygdala, singular cortex, hippocampus, and hypothalamus. 
Amygdala
Primarily responsible for fear conditioning and processing emotional responses. Stimulates fight or flight responses. Also involved with memory processing and decision-making. 
Anterior Cingulate Cortex (Medial Prefrontal Cortex)
Directs attention, inhibits responses, and plans a behavioral response. Other responsibilities include cognition and emotion, as well as modulating ambiguity. 
Posterior Cingulate Cortex
Processes, episodic memories and may be related to working memory performance
Hippocampus
Crucial in spatial navigation and the formulation and consolidation of memories. There are two hippocampi, one on each side of the brain. 
Brian basis of Dysphonic dyslexia
A deficit in phonology, which is housed in the temporal-parietal gradient along the supramarginal gyrus
Brain basis of surface dyslexia
A deficit in orthographical processing, housed in the angular gyrus, a parietal region involved in symbol system processing.

Brain basis of mixed dyslexia
Impairment in phonological and orthographical processing skills. Deficit in the inferior parietal lobes, involving both the supramarginal gyrus and angular gyrus.
Comprehension deficits
Mechanical aspect of reading is normal, but difficulty persists deriving meaning from print. Deficits may include poor language and vocabulary skills, limited working memory, or poor executive functioning skills that facilitate encoding and retrieval of verbal information. 
Verbal dyscalculia
Deficit in the automatic retrieval of number facts stored in a linguistic code. Brain region responsible for this function is the angular gyrus. 
Procedural dyscalculia
Difficulty recalling the algorithm or sequence of steps when performing longer math operation, such as multiplication and division. The left prefrontal region is responsible for sequential ordering of symbolic information. 
Semantic dyscalculia
Deficits in magnitude representations, understanding, higher level, math, concepts, and transcoding, difficult math operations into a base 10 format. Primary brain region is the horizontal interparietal sulcus.
Graphomotor dysgraphia
Motor skill deficits involved in the planning organization, guidance, and automaticity of motor movements that physically transcribe thoughts and ideas on paper. 
Dyslexic (spelling) dysgraphias (3 subtypes) 
A. Dysphonic dysgraphia - hinders the ability to differentiate sounds in words. The speller fails to represent every sound with a symbol.
B. Surface dysgraphia - impact the ability to spell phonetically, irregular words due to difficult difficulties, understanding, orthographic spelling patterns and conjuring up a visual image of the printed word form.
C. Mixed dysgraphia - the most severe type of spelling disorder characterized by a combination of poor phonological processing skills, poor orthographic skills, limited working memory, and bizarre spelling errors
Executive dysgraphias
A wide range of written language deficits that stem primarily from executive dysfunctions, including difficulty planning and organizing ideas, poor grammar and syntax, lack of a topic sentence, little elaboration, or detail, and poor understanding of how words and phrases can be combined. 
Cerebral structures of dysgraphia (written expression, and spelling depend on numerous spring structures working in concert)
A. Supramarginal gyrus - spelling by sound
B. Angular gyrus - visualizing words
C. Limbic system - emotional connectivity to the subject matter.
D. Anterior cingulate gyrus - focusing attention, inward toward internal resources, thoughts and ideas.
E. Hippocampus - retrieval of stored memories
F. Inferior parietal lobes - higher level thinking and problem-solving
G. Frontal lobe - syntactical arrangement of thoughts and ideas in a linguistic manner
H. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - Organization and planning of thoughts, self-monitoring responses, holding ideas in working memory, sustaining attention, initiating task, and maintaining motivational persistence
I. Pre-motor cortex - planning motor responses
J. Motor cortex - execution of metric act of writing
K. Basal ganglia - automaticity of handwriting
L. Cerebellum - motor coordination and sequencing
Focused attention
The anterior cingulate direct attention to a particular stimulus while the amygdala registers its emotional attractiveness or aversiveness 
Sustained attention
Vigilance is maintained by right inferior parietal lobe
Shifting attention
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex shifts attention from one stimulus to another.
Arousal
Brainstem regions, including the reticular formation of the midbrain and the locus coeruleus of the pins, are responsible for activating the brain when an external stimulus requires attention.
Declarative (conscious) memory
Generally stored in the temporal lobe and retrieved by the frontal lobe
Nondeclarative (unconscious) memory
Habits and procedural memories, often involving the stratum and basal ganglia regions 
Spatial memory
Memory for time and space house in the superior parietal lobe, hippocampus, globus pallidus, putamen, and ventrolateral thalamus.
Episodic memory
Memory for personal experiences; activated by frontal cortices and posterior cingulate gyrus. 
Working memory
The ability to hold and manipulate information; mediated by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
Cognitive executive functions - dorsolateral circuit
Primary projections go through the basil ganglia, helps to organize a behavioral response when solving complex problems. Other functions include planning and organization, time management, self monitoring, and effortful control of attention.
Emotional executive functions: orbitofrontal cortex
Mediates empathetic, civil, and socially appropriate behavior 
Emotional executive functions: ventrolateral prefrontal cortex
Situated adjacent to the orbitofrontal cortex, it is responsible for three facets of social: emotional valuation of stimuli, response, inhibition, and generation and use of behavioral rules in different contexts. It is also involved when taking another perspective on an emotional event (theory of mind).
Emotional executive functions: anterior cingulate cortex
Links attention capabilities with a given cognitive task, diverts, conscious energies toward internal cognitive events, or external stimuli, maintains a motivational state, deals with ambiguous situations, and emotional flexibility. 
Visual spatial processing: left superior parietal lobe
Stores over learned visual spatial tasks, such as right versus left or directionality
Visual spatial processing: right superior parietal lobe
Involved with mental rotation tasks for novel stimuli.
Visual spatial processing: lingual gyrus
Color perception
Visual spatial processing: fusiform gyrus
Facial perception in right hemisphere
Visual spatial processing: extrastriatal cortex
Visual association cortex in occipital lobes
Oral language development: superior temporal gyrus
Modulates phonemes, the fundamental sounds of a language
Oral language development: frontal lobes
Modulates syntax, the combinations of words in phrases and sentences, and the sequential arrangement of language. Also retrieve specific words.
Oral language development: temporal lobes
Stores the lexicon, which is a collection of all the words in a given language
Oral language development: Broca’s area
Modulates the production of speech
Oral language development: Wernicke’s area
Modulates the understanding of speech
Oral language disorders: Broca’s Aphasia
A type of nonfluent aphasia with impaired syntax and impaired comprehension of speech, that hinders speech production due to lesions in the anterior portion of the left hemisphere.
Oral language disorders: Wernicke’s Aphasia
A type of aphasia with fluent speech, but poor language comprehension. Specific damage is usually in the posterior portion of the left hemisphere. The person often produces random jargon or nonsensical words and phrases when attempting to speak.
