Cognitive and social cognitive terms

Central coherence: The cognitive process by which high-level meaning is derived from the weaving together of otherwise piecemeal information.

Empathy: The ability to (fully) understand the perspectives of other people.

Executive functions: Cognitive processes, such as planning, orienting towards goal, ability to postpone, etc., believed to reflect frontal (or prefrontal) neural activiy.

Eye direction detector: Hypothetical construct. Refers to the ability within the visual modality to build representations of self-other-object relations, which, in turn, enables joint attention.

Joint attention: A behaviour shown already by infants prior to one year of age signifying that the child shows that s/he is attending to the same thing or event that also attract the attention of another person.

Theory of mind: The ability to impute mental states to others and to oneself.

Genetic terms

Autosomes: Chromosome pairs numbers 1 to 22, in contrast to the gonosomes (see below).

Centromere: Constricted portion of the chromosome which divides it into long and short arms.

Deletion: Part of a chromosome arm broken off. Usually abbreviated ‘del’ or symbolized by p- if occurring on the short ‘p-arm’ (from the French word ‘petit’, meaning small) and by q-if occurring on the long arm of the chromosome.

DNA: Deoxyribonucleic acid, a sequence of socalled nucleotides (bases), usually double stranded.

Dominant trait: A trait which is expressed in the phenotype in the heterozygous condition.

Duplication: Presence of a segment of a chromosome in a double dose on the same chromosome.