Insight into how the association areas work has come primarily from observations of human patients with damage to one or another of these regions. Outputs from the association cortices reach the hippocampus, the basal ganglia and cerebellum, the thalamus, and other association cortices. ![]() Inputs to the association cortices include projections from the primary and secondary sensory and motor cortices, the thalamus, and the brainstem. Given the complexity of these tasks, it is not surprising that the association cortices receive and integrate information from a variety of sources, and that they influence a broad range of cortical and subcortical targets. More specifically, cognition refers to the ability to attend to external stimuli or internal motivation, to identify the significance of such stimuli, and to plan meaningful responses to them. The diverse functions of the association cortices are loosely referred to as “ cognition,” which literally means the process by which we come to know the world (“cognition” is perhaps not the best word to indicate this wide range of neural functions, but it has already become part of the working vocabulary of neurologists and neuroscientists). ![]() The association cortices include most of the cerebral surface of the human brain and are largely responsible for the complex processing that goes on between the arrival of input in the primary sensory cortices and the generation of behavior.
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