Week 5 Vocab

Question 1

Unimodal (modality-specific) association cortex

Answer 1

cerebral cortex that functions for one specific function; i.e., somatosensory cortex, visual cortex and receives its input from primary sensory cortex of a specific sensory modality and performs higher-order sensory processing for that modality

Question 2

Heteromodal (higher-order) association cortex

Answer 2

cerebral cortex that has bidirectional connections with both motor and sensory association cortex of all modalities.

Question 3

Aphasia

Answer 3

loss of ability to understand or express speech, caused by brain damage.

Question 4

Dysarthria

Answer 4

difficult or unclear articulation of speech that is otherwise linguistically normal.

Question 5

Apraxia

Answer 5

inability to perform particular purposive actions, as a result of brain damage.

Question 6

Alexia

Answer 6

the inability to see words or to read, caused by a defect of the brain.

Question 7

Agraphia

Answer 7

inability to write letters, symbols, words, or sentences, resulting from damage to various parts of the brain.

Question 8

Broca’s aphasia

Answer 8

caused by lesions affecting Broca’s area and adjacent structures in the dominant frontal lobe; also known as motor aphasia or expressive aphasia and is characterized by impaired fluency in speech.

Question 9

Wernicke’s aphasia

Answer 9

caused by lesions affecting Wernicke’s area and adjacent structures in the dominant temporoparietal lobes; also known as sensory aphasia or receptive aphasia and is characterized by impaired comprehension.

Question 10

Hemineglect syndrome

Answer 10

often one of the most dramatic syndromes in clinical neurology occurring with infarcts or other acute lesions of the right parietal or right frontal lobes.

Question 11

Working memory

Answer 11

the part of short-term memory that is concerned with immediate conscious perceptual and linguistic processing.

Question 12

Selective attention

Answer 12

the capacity for or process of reacting to certain stimuli selectively when several occur simultaneously.

Question 13

Agnosia

Answer 13

inability to interpret sensations and hence to recognize things, typically as a result of brain damage.

Question 14

Dementia

Answer 14

a condition characterized by progressive or persistent loss of intellectual functioning, especially with impairment of memory and abstract thinking, and often with personality change, resulting from organic disease of the brain.

Question 15

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI)

Answer 15

cognitive deterioration beyond statistical norms for age-matched controls.

Question 16

Alzheimer’s disease

Answer 16

a pathology characterized by cerebral atrophy, neuronal loss, amyloid plaques, and neurofibrillary tangles and characterized by loss of recent memories, with relative sparing of remote memories and with continued disease progression symptoms include word finding difficulties and behavioral impairments.