Neuroscience

← Back to Domain-Specific Abstractions by Origin Domain

64 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Neuroscience. They span 62 subdomains — sort by that column to group them, or click any subdomain to filter to it.

Abstraction	Subdomain	Description
Accommodation Index	Spike Train AnalysisComputational Neuroscience	The accommodation index is a statistic used in the neurosciences for describing spike train data.
Agnosia	Clinical Neurology	Impaired recognition of objects, people, sounds, shapes, or odors despite intact primary sensation and memory.
Alpha Wave	Clinical NeurophysiologyElectroencephalography	The reactive posterior 8–13 Hz EEG rhythm of relaxed wakefulness, strongest with eyes closed and attenuated by eye opening or attention, whose identity requires topography and reactivity rather than frequency alone.
Axonal Transport	Cell Biology of the Neuron	Supply a neuron's remote, synthetically helpless synaptic terminals from its central soma via motor proteins walking microtubule tracks — kinesin outward, dynein inward — so a failure starves the terminal first, producing a distal dying-back signature.
BCM theory	Computational NeuroscienceSynaptic Plasticity	Bienenstock–Cooper–Munro (BCM) theory, BCM synaptic modification, or the BCM rule, named after Elie Bienenstock, Leon Cooper, and Paul Munro, is a physical theory of learning in the visual cortex developed in 1981.
Bi-directional hypothesis of language and action	Cognitive Neuroscience	The embodied-cognition hypothesis that language comprehension and sensorimotor activity influence one another reciprocally.
Binding Neuron	Computational Neuroscience	An abstract spiking-neuron model that retains excitatory impulses for a finite window and emits one spike when enough temporally overlapping inputs reach threshold, with inhibition tightening the required coherence.
Brain Simulation	Computational Neuroscience	An executable computational model of a brain, region, circuit, or neural population whose declared biological components and dynamics are evolved over time to reproduce, explain, or predict neural activity and behavior.
Central Executive Network	Systems Neuroscience	Coordinate goal-directed, externally oriented cognition through a distributed frontoparietal control network that maintains task rules, working-memory contents, and top-down attention while flexibly coupling to other systems as demands change.
Central Pattern Generator	Motor Systems	A localized neural circuit that produces structured rhythmic motor output — locomotion, breathing, chewing — from its own intrinsic membrane and synaptic properties, so sensory and descending signals are demoted from pacemakers to mere modulators.
Coincidence detection in neurobiology	Systems Neuroscience	A neural computation in which a neuron responds selectively when multiple inputs arrive within a narrow temporal window.
Compartmental neuron models	Computational NeuroscienceDendritic Modeling	Basically, compartmental modelling of dendrites is a very helpful tool to develop new biological neuron models.
Corollary discharge theory	Sensorimotor Neuroscience	A sensorimotor account in which a copy of an outgoing movement command predicts the sensory consequences of self-motion, allowing comparison with incoming sensory change so self-generated and external motion can be distinguished.
Cortical Spreading Depression	Cortical Electrophysiology	A depolarizing front traverses cerebral cortex while spontaneous electrical activity is newly suppressed in its wake at successive sites.
De Novo Protein Synthesis Theory of Memory Formation	Molecular Memory Consolidation	The contested neuroscience hypothesis that new protein synthesis near learning is necessary for durable stabilization of at least some long-term memories.
Dehaene–Changeux model	Computational NeuroscienceGlobal Workspace Theory	A neural-network implementation of the global neuronal workspace account in which local processors and long-range workspace neurons model conscious access, decision-making, and reportable cognitive integration.
Docking theory of olfaction	Olfaction ScienceChemosensory Neuroscience	The docking theory of olfaction proposes that the smell of an odorant molecule is due to a range of weak non-covalent interactions between the odorant [a ligand] and one or more G protein-coupled odorant receptors (found in the nasal epithelium).
Efficient coding hypothesis	Computational NeuroscienceSensory Coding	A key prediction of the efficient coding hypothesis is that sensory processing in the brain should be adapted to natural stimuli.
Electroencephalography	Clinical NeurophysiologyElectrophysiology	The use of computer signal processing of the EEG – so-called quantitative electroencephalography – is somewhat controversial when used for clinical purposes (although there are many research uses).
Equilibrium Potential	Membrane PhysiologyElectrophysiology	For channels that are permeable to only a single type of ion, the reversal potential is identical to the equilibrium potential of the ion.
Equipotentiality	History of NeuropsychologyLocalization and Distributed Function	Represent Lashley's historical hypothesis that, within a relevant functional cortical area and task class, intact portions can assume functions lost when other portions are damaged, often with reduced efficiency.
F-I curve	ElectrophysiologyComputational Neuroscience	The firing frequency a neuron produces across applied current levels under a stated protocol and rate convention.
Gain-field encoding	Motor NeuroscienceSensorimotor Integration	Gain field encoding is a hypothesis about the internal storage and processing of limb motion in the brain.
Gliosis	Glial BiologyNeuropathology	A context-dependent reactive change in central nervous system glia after injury or in disease, which may alter cell state and tissue organization without requiring a scar or a fixed functional outcome.
Hering's Law of Equal Innervation	Oculomotor Control	A binocular motor principle positing equal drive to yoked eye muscles, with movements decomposable into conjugate version and disjunctive vergence components.
Hindmarsh–Rose model	Computational NeuroscienceNeuron Models	The Hindmarsh-Rose model is a three-variable nonlinear dynamical system for neuronal membrane potential and fast and slow recovery currents that reproduces spiking, bursting, and transitions between firing regimes.
Hyperpolarization (biology)	Cellular Electrophysiology	A cell membrane-potential shift to a more negative value than a specified stable pre-response baseline.
Inhibitory Postsynaptic Potential	Synaptic Physiology	A graded postsynaptic voltage response whose receptor-gated conductance and reversal potential reduce the target cell's probability of reaching spike threshold.
Interactive Specialization	Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceFunctional Brain Development	A brain-development hypothesis in which reciprocal activity-dependent interactions among regions, body, and environment progressively produce functional specialization rather than merely reveal fixed modules.
Language processing in the brain	Neurolinguistics	The distributed neural transformations that map spoken, written, or signed linguistic input and communicative intentions through phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and sensorimotor representations into comprehension or production.
Magnetoencephalography	Functional Neuroimaging	Recording brain-generated magnetic fields over time and inferring neural activity under source-model limits.
Microneurography	Human Neurophysiology	Directly record localized activity from living human peripheral nerves for bounded physiological interpretation.
Multisensory integration	—	Multisensory integration, also known as multimodal integration, is the study of how information from the different sensory modalities (such as sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and proprioception) may be integrated by the nervous system.
Neural accommodation	Cellular Neurophysiology	Neural accommodation or neuronal accommodation occurs when a neuron or muscle cell is depolarised by slowly rising current (ramp depolarisation) in vitro.
Neural coding	Neural Representation and Decoding	Relate external or internal variables to neural response patterns through an explicit encoding model and assess what a decoder can recover under noise, sampling, and task constraints.
Neural processing for individual categories of objects	Cognitive NeuroscienceVisual Object Recognition	Consistently, faces and buildings were found to be processed independently of each other and in discrete cortical regions suggesting that processing is facilitated by assigning object categories to distinct cortical regions according to the level and type of processing that they require.
Neuronal recycling hypothesis	Cognitive NeuroscienceCultural Learning and Cortical Reuse	Explain culturally recent capacities as constrained reuses of older cortical circuits whose inherited organization supplies a compatible neuronal niche and is partially reshaped through learning.
Neuroplasticity	Developmental and Learning Neuroscience	The nervous system rewires itself in response to experience by strengthening or weakening synapses under fixed rules of change, with how much it can rewire gated by a developmental window that is wide in youth and narrower in the adult.
Neurotransmission	Cellular Neurophysiology	Locate a neuron's flexibility not in the all-or-none spike but in the transformation across the synaptic gap — a quantal, probabilistic, context-modulated transfer decomposable into an ordered chain of mechanism slots that drugs and disorders each perturb at one point.
Ocular tremor	Visual Neuroscience	A tiny high-frequency involuntary component of normal fixational eye movement that persists during attempted visual fixation.
Place Field	Systems Neuroscience	Reify a place cell's spatial tuning as a measurable object — the bounded region where its firing rate is reliably elevated — turning 'the hippocampus represents space' into a battery of scalars (size, peak, stability, remapping) that travel across preparations.
Premovement neuronal activity	Motor Neurophysiology	Premovement neuronal activity is a reproducible modulation of neuronal firing that occurs before overt voluntary movement and can encode preparation, selection, timing, direction, force, or expected consequences of the action.
Purkinje Effect	Visual Perception	Explain why red darkens and blue seems to glow at dusk: as light falls, the eye hands off from cones (peaking ~555 nm) to rods (peaking ~507 nm), so a whole different sensitivity curve — not the surfaces — reweights apparent brightness.
Quantal Neurotransmitter Release	Synaptic Physiology	Discrete chemical-synapse release of neurotransmitter packets from individual vesicles, producing elementary postsynaptic responses that can combine into a larger signal.
Representational drift	Systems NeuroscienceNeural Coding	The gradual change in population-level neural activity patterns encoding stable information or behavior, despite continued functional performance.
Retinotopy	Systems Neuroscience	Preserve the two-dimensional layout of the visual field as a two-dimensional layout on visual cortex — adjacent points in the world projecting to adjacent neurons — an invertible map that lets a lesion predict a scotoma and a rotating stimulus reconstruct the map.
Reuptake	Synaptic Physiology	Transporter-mediated removal of a released neurotransmitter from extracellular synaptic space into a neuron or glial cell.
Ribot's law	NeuropsychologyMemory Disorders	The historical temporal-gradient hypothesis that retrograde amnesia preferentially impairs recently formed memories while relatively sparing older, more consolidated memories.
Salience Network	Systems Neuroscience	Model a control network — anterior insula and dorsal ACC hubs — that detects behaviourally relevant events and switches the brain between its two content networks (internally directed default mode and externally directed executive), so cognition is read as a configuration plus a switching variable rather than a catalogue of regions.
Seed-based d mapping	Neuroimaging Meta AnalysisNeuroimaging	Seed-based d mapping (formerly Signed differential mapping) or SDM is a statistical technique created by Joaquim Radua for meta-analysis studies assessing differences in brain activity or structure via neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI, VBM, DTI or PET.
Sensory map	Sensory NeuroscienceTopographic Maps	Sensory maps are areas of the brain which responds to sensory stimulation, and are spatially organized according to some feature of the sensory stimulation.
Sensory Substitution	Sensory AugmentationAssistive Interfaces	An engineered cross-sensory code makes otherwise inaccessible environmental information usable through a different sensory channel.
Shunting (neurophysiology)	NeurophysiologySynaptic Integration	Shunting is an event in the neuron which occurs when an excitatory postsynaptic potential and an inhibitory postsynaptic potential are occurring close to each other on a dendrite, or are both on the soma of the cell.
Somatotopy	Cortical Organization	Represent the body surface on neural tissue as a continuous neighbourhood-preserving map — adjacent body regions projecting to adjacent neural loci — with magnification set by receptor density and behavioural importance rather than body size, and reshaped by an activity-dependent plasticity rule.
Spatial memory	Cognitive NeuroscienceHippocampal Memory	In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, spatial memory is a form of memory responsible for the recording and recovery of information needed to plan a course to a location and to recall the location of an object or the occurrence of an event.
Speech repetition	NeurolinguisticsAphasiology	The automatic nature of speech repetition was noted by Carl Wernicke, the late nineteenth century neurologist, who observed that "The primary speech movements, enacted before the development of consciousness, are reflexive and mimicking in nature..".
Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity	Synaptic Plasticity	A synaptic learning rule where the sign of a weight change depends on the millisecond order of pre- and postsynaptic spikes — pre-before-post potentiates, post-before-pre depresses — turning a coincidence detector into a causality detector that grows directed connectivity.
Stereoelectroencephalography	Clinical NeurophysiologyInvasive Epilepsy Evaluation	A patient-specific seizure-network hypothesis is sampled in three dimensions with stereotactically implanted multicontact depth electrodes, and intracerebral recordings, stimulation, anatomy, and clinical signs are integrated to guide epilepsy treatment.
Swinging light test	Clinical Neuro OphthalmologyPupillary Reflex Examination	Compare the bilateral afferent pupillary light responses under alternating equivalent illumination to reveal a relative asymmetry that can support recognition of a relative afferent pupillary defect.
Synaptic Plasticity	Cellular and Systems Neuroscience	The capacity of individual synapses to undergo lasting changes in transmission efficacy driven by their joint activity history, giving memory a physical address as a modifiable weight distribution and organizing a family of mechanisms along direction, timescale, polarity, modality, and gating.
Synaptic Pruning	Developmental Neuroscience	During nervous-system development and plasticity, activity and molecular tagging selectively eliminate weaker or inappropriate synapses, refining exuberant early connectivity into efficient, experience-shaped circuits.
Theta model	Computational NeuroscienceNeuron Models	The theta model, or Ermentrout–Kopell canonical model, is a biological neuron model originally developed to mathematically describe neurons in the animal Aplysia.
Three-Factor Learning	Computational Neuroscience	A synaptic learning-rule structure in which presynaptic activity, postsynaptic state, and an additional modulatory signal jointly govern plasticity.
Voltage clamp	Cellular NeurophysiologyElectrophysiology	The voltage clamp is an experimental method used by electrophysiologists to measure the ion currents through the membranes of excitable cells, such as neurons, while holding the membrane voltage at a set level.