Visual Processing and Awareness
This phenomenon, involves the ability to respond to visual stimuli (like motion or orientation) despite having no conscious experience of "seeing" due to primary visual cortex damage
What is blindsight?
This type of processing occurs when a person's expectations or prior knowledge (such as looking for a friend's yellow house in the fog) allows the cortex to influence the sensory input it receives from the thalamus.
What is top-down (or feedback) processing?
For children with DLD, these two specific types of social-emotional difficulties at age 4 are significant predictors of a lower quality of life later in middle childhood
What are emotional symptoms and peer problems?
This term refers to the smallest unit of sound in a language that can signal a change in meaning, such as the difference between the sounds /b/ and /p/ in the words "bat" and "pat".
What is a phoneme?
This procedure involves anesthetizing a single hemisphere to determine which side of the brain is responsible for speech output, a critical step in pre-surgical planning for epilepsy.
What is the Wada technique (or Wada test)?
While the cones in the fovea are essential for seeing fine details and color, these photoreceptors are located in the periphery and are more sensitive to low light, though they lack detail.
What are rods?
This spiral-shaped structure in the inner ear contains the hair cells that perform mechano-electrical transduction, converting sound waves into neural signals that the brain can interpret.
What is the cochlea?
This "protective factor" for healthy deaf child development is often delayed due to standard practices, potentially leading to permanent brain changes and cognitive delays.
What is fully accessible language (or sign language exposure)?
This core component of language consists of the rules of grammar that govern how words are put together to form organized sentences.
What is syntax?
This term describes speech that is clipped and contains mostly content words (nouns and verbs) while lacking function words and word endings, similar to the style of a text message.
What is telegraphic speech?
This anatomical crossover point is where information from the nasal half of each retina crosses to the opposite side of the brain, ensuring the right hemisphere processes the left visual field and vice versa.
What is the optic chiasm?
Similar to the layout of the primary visual cortex, the primary auditory cortex (A1) uses this "map" where neurons are physically organized according to the specific sound frequencies they respond to.
What is a tonotopic map?
This construct describes the level of specificity an individual uses to verbally represent their affective experiences, with higher levels being linked to better coping with stress.
What is emotional granularity (or emotion differentiation)?
This aspect of language relates to the meaning of words and sentences.
What is semantics?
These are errors in speech production where a person substitutes a word with one that has a similar meaning (e.g., "barn" for "house") or a similar sound (e.g., "fable" for "table").
What are paraphasias?
This "fast-acting" midbrain pathway allows a person to quickly orient their head and eyes toward a sudden motion in their peripheral vision before they even consciously recognize what the object is.
What is the tectopulvinar pathway?
This specific auditory deficit, which can be seen in school-aged children, involves a struggle to perceive the "timing" or "pitch" of sounds correctly, making it difficult to distinguish between similar phonemes like /ba/ and /da/.
What is a phonological processing (or central auditory processing) deficit?
Unlike cutaneous pain, this type of pain arises from internal organs, is less clearly localized, and is often thought to have a stronger affective or "unpleasantness" dimension.
What is visceral pain?
This "disconnection" concept occurs when a person can comprehend speech and produce fluent speech but cannot repeat what they have just heard because the link between the two areas is damaged.
What is conduction aphasia?
Often seen in language disorders, these are "made-up" words that follow the phonetic rules of a language but have no actual meaning
What are neologisms?
This clinical term describes a "blind spot" in the visual field caused by a small lesion in the retinotopic map; it often goes unnoticed by patients because the brain automatically "fills in" the missing information.
What is a scotoma?
In the "Where" pathway of hearing, the brain calculates this—the difference in the loudness of a sound between the two ears—to help determine if a sound is coming from the left or the right.
What is interaural intensity difference?
This emerging era in behavioral and cognitive sciences recognizes that affective processes are not "irrational" but are fundamental drivers of attention, learning, and decision-making.
What is Affectivism?
This hemisphere of the brain is responsible for "coarse" semantic processing, helping an individual understand non-literal language like metaphors, jokes, and the overall moral of a story.
What is the right hemisphere?
In school-aged children or clinical patients, this specific assessment task—which requires the individual to name a pictured object—is used to identify "word-finding" difficulties even when their connected speech seems fluent.
What is confrontational naming?