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References: Language, Attention, and Decision-Making

  1. Aphasia - National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIH) - A clear government overview of what aphasia is, its causes, the main types (Broca's, Wernicke's, conduction, global, and primary progressive), and how speech-language therapy helps. A good first stop for the clinical side of this chapter.

  2. Aphasia - American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) public information site (asha.org's public aphasia page redirects here) - Explains aphasia in everyday language from the point of view of patients and families, including the important point that aphasia does not affect intelligence. Useful for building empathy and communication tips.

  3. 19.5 How Do Clinical Disorders Affect Attentional Function? - OpenStax, Introduction to Behavioral Neuroscience (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) - A free college-level section on hemispatial neglect and ADHD, including the bedside tests for neglect. A good next step if you want more depth than this chapter.

  4. 19.6 How Do We Use Executive Functions to Make Decisions and Achieve Goals? - OpenStax, Introduction to Behavioral Neuroscience (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) - Covers task switching, inhibition, planning, and the role of the prefrontal cortex, with descriptions of the Stroop and Wisconsin Card Sorting tasks. Helps connect executive function to real experiments.

  5. Executive Functions - Adele Diamond, Annual Review of Psychology (2013), free full text on PubMed Central - The widely cited review that defines the three core executive functions (inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility) and discusses how stress, sleep, and practice affect them. Long, but the opening sections are readable for motivated students.

  6. Spatial Neglect and Attention Networks - Maurizio Corbetta and Gordon Shulman, Annual Review of Neuroscience (2011), free full text on PubMed Central - A research review arguing that neglect comes from disrupted attention networks rather than a single damaged spot, and explaining why it usually follows right-hemisphere injury. Best for advanced readers and Brain Bee competitors.

  7. Dopamine Reward Prediction Error Coding - Wolfram Schultz, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience (2016), free full text on PubMed Central - A short review by the scientist who discovered the signal, explaining how dopamine neurons respond to better-than-expected, expected, and worse-than-expected rewards, and how drugs of addiction hijack this system.

  8. Speech and Language Therapy for Aphasia Following Stroke - Marian Brady and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2016), free full text on PubMed Central - A systematic review of 57 randomized trials showing that speech and language therapy improves everyday communication after stroke. A good example of how doctors weigh evidence for a treatment.

  9. Roger W. Sperry: Facts - NobelPrize.org - The official page for Sperry's share of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with the exact prize citation and a short biography. Useful for checking historical facts about split-brain research.

  10. Split-brain - Wikipedia - A readable overview of corpus callosotomy, the classic split-brain experiments by Sperry and Gazzaniga, and later research that complicated the "two minds" story. Use it as a starting point, then check its cited sources.