Cognitive Communication Disorders Flashcards

This set of vocabulary flashcards summarizes the etiology, cognitive domains, and functional impacts of various cognitive communication disorders based on the lecture transcript.

mTBI / Concussion

A condition characterized by reduced efficiency and endurance under cognitive load where "forgetfulness" is often driven by attention failure rather than storage loss.

Moderate–Severe TBI

An injury causing a foundational bottleneck through disruption of Salience and CEN networks, leading to a significant breakdown in new learning and impaired initiation and planning.

Right Hemisphere Disorder (RHD)

A disorder primarily characterized by spatial neglect, failure to orient to contralesional information, and profound anosognosia (lack of awareness).

Spatial neglect

The primary attention disorder in RHD involving a failure to orient to contralesional information.

Anosognosia

A profound lack of awareness or poor self-monitoring of pragmatic rules, often seen in Right Hemisphere Disorder.

Alzheimer’s Disease (Early-Mid)

A condition with an early breakdown in episodic memory and declarative memory formation, where processing slows as pathology spreads to frontal cortices.

Vascular Dementia

A dementia type exhibiting pathological slowing of mental processing and executive retrieval deficits, with performance that often fluctuates day-to-day.

Dementia with Lewy Bodies

A condition marked by fluctuations in alertness and attention across minutes or days, and prominent visuospatial dysfunction including recurrent visual hallucinations.

Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD)

A disorder characterized by profound apathy, disinhibition, and an early loss of empathy (Theory of Mind) due to frontal lobe degeneration.

Theory of Mind

The cognitive capacity for empathy and understanding others' perspectives, which suffers an early loss in Frontotemporal Dementia.

Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA)

A progressive language degradation (syntax, word retrieval, or comprehension) where non-language cognitive systems and insight remain relatively spared early on.

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)

A decline in new learning beyond normal aging expectations where basic self-care and independence are preserved, but IADLs require significantly more compensatory effort.

Salience and CEN

The neural networks whose widespread disruption in Moderate–Severe TBI limits other cognitive domains.

Metabolic stress

A condition under which symptoms of mTBI/Concussion, such as attention-driven forgetfulness, typically emerge.

Stepwise progression

The pattern of progression for cerebrovascular events in Vascular Dementia that influences the variability of a patient's performance.