Talk:Extinction (neurology)

This article has a lot of good information and each topic is described sufficiently. I do not think that this article requires much more research. It is a fairly confusing topic and I think you do a good job of explaining all the types of extinction. However, there is one informational issue that I would like to address and I think that some of the structure of the paper needs to be changed. There are also many grammatical errors and errors in Wikipedia formatting that need to be changed.

The one major informational issue that I have is with the ideas of extinction and spatial neglect. In the introduction to your article, you state that extinction leads to spatial neglect. However, in Haan et al (“Mechanisms and anatomy of unilateral extinction after brain injury.”), they describe how extinction should be distinguished from spatial neglect. They claim that extinction involves the inability to pay attention to multiple stimuli presented simultaneously, while neglect is a deficit in the active exploration and detection of a contralesional stimulus amongst distractors. They mention that these disorders may often be presented simultaneously in a patient, but not that one causes the other. While other sources may have slightly different interpretations, I do not think that such a statement should be the intro sentence of the article, since it may not be true.

The one structural issue is in the History section. I think that only a select few points made in this section should be considered history, such as the point about the German neurologists. Also, I think the two theories of extinction should have their own subsection.

There is also some repeated information throughout the article. In the section on olfactory extinction, the second and third paragraphs, although obtained from different sources, contain essentially the same information. It is repeated twice that RBD patients with left tactile extinction often correctly identified the left nostril stimulus, but describe it as coming in the right nostril. One of these paragraphs could probably be eliminated.

There are also Wikipedia formatting issues with the references and hyperlinking. The references should all have a DOI or PMID associated with them, which can be clicked to get to the webpage of the source. Also, in the actual article, references need to have superscript numbers that are hyperlinked to the reference section at the bottom. Creating the reference from the toolbar at the top of the edit page will automatically create this hyperlinked number. You also need to hyperlink important words and phrases that would allow readers to be linked to other Wikipedia pages for a better description.

The article also needs to be proofread. I found a lot of grammatical and spelling errors throughout the article.

Mlodzins (talk) 04:27, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you! It seems to me you could be really good at fixing these problems. Could you do that?   Lova Falk     talk   09:26, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your thorough response. I will definitely correct the gramatical errors. We have also fixed what you mentioned in the second paragraph about the informational issue so I hope everything is clear now. We have also divided into the history section taking into consideration your suggestion. We split it into three new categories with more detailed titles to specify exactly what the information was talking about. We also corrected the olfactory section by joining the paragraphs and eliminating some of the information so that it would be less repetitive. We have also checked the gramar, hyperlinked the words and fixed the citations. Hope this covers all your questions and again thank you for your feedback.Noor9279 (talk) 04:50, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

The “history” section seems to really be discussing the concept and individual theories of extinction rather than a history of the topic. The first two paragraphs of the “history” section could also be separated from the next three paragraphs. Perhaps the first two paragraphs could be explained as a “history” still, though a better word could be used maybe “concept.” Then, the last three paragraphs could be made into a “theory” section in which you compare and contrast the sensory theory and the representational theory for instance. I think this would 1. Take away from the bulk of the history section and 2. Make the information more readily accessible to the reader. Also a subheading for each of the two theories would be helpful in a new “theory” section created from the last three paragraphs of the current “history” section.
 * Thank you for you feedback. We have divided the history section into three more specific categories. Hopefully this will make it more clear what each section is discussing. Noor9279 (talk) 04:50, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Whitenp (talk) 12:29 p.m., 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I changed the introduction so that spatial neglect is not mentioned as a result of extinction. Jlue00 (talk) 10:27, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

an educational assignment?
Do I understand correctly that this article is the subject of an educational assignment? And that Mlodzins (talk) is a teacher talking to a student? It would have been nice if you could have put a template on top of the talk page, or otherwise have informed us other editors. Wikipedia is the result a collaborative effort, and when I read the comment above I thought they were directed to just any editor, like me. Lova Falk    talk   10:02, 17 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Lova Falk--this is an assignment for our neuroscience class and the people commenting are fellow students in the class. The professor Joseph Burdo will also look it over. CorinneMarieClifford (talk) 01:04, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your answer and welcome!  Lova Falk     talk   19:06, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes. Sorry if this wasn't clear but thank you for your feedback. Noor9279 (talk) 04:50, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

peer edit
Might consider breaking up the “history” section to make it easier for the reader to follow—big blocks of text are sometimes intimidating and hard to navigate

I would not use the phrase “we” --“We can think of one primary component of neglect as involving inattention and that extinction is by no means the whole story for neglect”

Link your references to the body of the text that way it is easier to refer back

Link key terms to their Wikipedia article for more information

I would avoid using abbreviations without explaining what it stands for and what it is ex. TPJ, RBD (explained it in paragraphs way after it was introduced)

Maybe include a labeled diagram of the brain to show the different regions that can be affected

Expand on tactile extinction (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8091440 could be a good source)

Many grammar problems—needs to be proofread once more

Overall it was very good, and well organized, and easy to follow. I hope these suggestions help!


 * Thank you very much for you feedback. We have divided the history section so that every title is more specific about the information in the section in hopes to clear some of the confusion. We have also now hyperlinked words and corrected the references. I checked that all abbreviations were described somewhere in the text so that there would be no confusion. We also looked over the gramatical errors so thank you for pointing that out.Noor9279 (talk) 04:50, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Article is very well written and contains a lot of good information. You utilize many different sources and integrate them successfully

-I think however, there are some things you can do to make your article better. I think it could definitely be improved by linking key words to their appropriate Wikipedia pages so that readers can easily comprehend the article as a whole. There are many very specific, scientific words in this article and linking will be tremendously helpful.

-It would be a good idea to add a little more in the introduction. The introduction should give the reader a good preview of the entire article, and I feel that many readers only read the introduction when navigating Wikipedia. In order to expand the intro I recommend writing a sentence or two about each of the main points of types of extinction and definitely about the physiology.

-The history section is extremely large, and I think dividing it or removing some of the less important paragraphs will allow the article to be more readable. I think you should focus on a couple of the most important cases.

-In the first paragraph of the history section you use the world unilateral three times in a row to start each sentence making the sentences feel repetitive.

-I do not think you did the citations properly. The citations should be embedded within the text so that they appear as square bracketed numbers that are linked to the reference section. You do it properly one time in the visual extinction paragraph, but then resort to normal parenthetically numbered citations for the rest. For a guide to proper formatting look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources.

-In the third paragraph of the history section you talk about recent literature favoring a theory. I think that you should create a new paragraph that just talks about recent research and expand on this. I feel like recent research/literature should not belong in the history paragraph anyways.

-There should be a comma after fMRI in the sentence “Recent studies have used measures such as ERPs and fMRI and it is believed that the parietal lobe mediates the internal representation of both body and space.”

-There are multiple spelling errors. I would recommend proofreading again.

-The divisions on the types of extinction are very well done. They give a good analysis and clearly show why they are different in their own way.

-“Space” is spelt wrong in the multisensory paragraph.

-It would be helpful if the articles in the reference section were linked so that they can be easily looked up.

-The addition of a picture could go along way. Using Wikipedia commons via http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is very useful if you want to bypass all the all the copyright procedure.

This is a good article, and it was very educational.Sanjayrau (talk) 02:34, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks,the references are linked properly now I think and some pictures have been added. Jlue00 (talk) 10:31, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your comments. We have corrected the history section so that it is more clear by splitting it up into three more detailed titles. We have also corrected our references and hyperlinked the words. I have added to pictures in hopes of making it a little more visually stimulating but there are limited pictures that relate to the topic. After the reading the article over we have fixed all the gramatical mistakes. Hopefully it is much better now.Noor9279 (talk) 04:51, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

This is a very informative Wikipedia page. This page could benefit greatly from utilizing links to other Wikipedia articles within the article. There are a large number of different words and phrases within this article that could link to other pages and help the reader better understand the topic (spatial neglect, lesion, etc.). Another issue with this page is in regards to formatting of the footnotes. If you were to utilize a formatting that allowed them to be less incorporated into the text, I believe that it would allow the article to have a greater sense of flow. The page Referencing for beginners may be able to provide some assistance in the formatting for your references. The history section is a rather long section, is there a way that you could break it down into smaller sections to make it easier for the reader? You could change how you break down the theories in order to break up the very large chunk of text that is presented to the reader in this section. It does not seem like every paragraph that is part of this section has to be part of the heading of History. There are some sentence structure issues that can cause some confusion and flow issues. Under the Physiology/Characteristics the first sentence could flow better through the usage of “by large lesions” instead of “of large legions.” Under olfactory extinction this sentence could use some revision for clarity, “Yet this interpretation is questionable because normal subjects appear unable to localize to a nostril a lateralized olfactory stimulus without the aid of an associated stimulation of the crossed trigeminal input from that same nostril.” Due to the nature of an encyclopedia article, try and remove “we” from the article wherever possible. This page could benefit from images and links to other Wikipedia pages and also some fine-tuning in terms of sentence structuring. Hfunk (talk) 01:09, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. I fixed the "by large lesions" part that you mentioned for physiology section. Jaeha24 (talk) 07:11, 3 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your response. I have divided the history section into three more detailed sections so that theres no confusion about what each title is covering. We have also corrected the references and hyperlinked the words. Hope this makes the article better.Noor9279 (talk) 04:51, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Not only is this article very long, but it is also very well written and filled with very good sources. One of the obvious things you should probably correct is to make all your footnotes look like the end of your sentence under Visual : "It is thus believed that extinction is caused by sensory neglect, and that extinction reflects an attentional deficit rather than a contralesional deficit in primary perceptual processing."[1]

Your physiology section should probably be expanded in terms of explaining the details of how neural extinction presents its symptoms over the majority of species it affects. There could also be a section on diagnosis and lifestyles of someone with neural extinction, since it does have an adverse effect on quality of life and pertains to the topic quite strongly.

Aside from the bulk of the article being very well written, there seems to be a frequency of "run on" type sentences that may confuse the reader. The sentences might need to be looked over. Such a sentence would be like what you have under Extinction of Taste; "The patient missed most of the left hemitongue stimuli on bilateral stimulation, or less frequently wrongly attributed to them the quality of the concurrent right stimulus." This could be "The patient missed most of the left hemitongue stimuli on bilateral stimulation, and also wrongly attributed the quality of the concurrent right stimuli to them, but on fewer occasions."

Otherwise, this is a very promising article. Waleedfarag (talk) 22:53, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your feedback. We have corrected the gramatical mistakes and hope that there are no other errors. Noor9279 (talk) 04:51, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Review
There is a lot that needs to be done to this page. The two main things is that 1.) There needs to be the correct citation in the page. See other pages if you are unsure how to do this.  If this isn't done the page won't be complete and cannot be used correctly.  2.) There aren't any hyperlinked words to other pages on wikipedia. This needs to be done for the readers sake so they can look at other subjects/topics they are not familiar with both quickly and easily.

Also, you have to state any sentence which is from another source. There are a lot of facts you got from sources that you have not cited. It may also be beneficial to put an image to break up the monotony of the long paragraph type page. Easier to understand things via visual aids than just reading a lot. Mainly fix the things in the first paragraph as these are major problems with the page. AdamMJenks (talk) 14:46, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your help. I added some hyperlinks to my section, physiology/characteristics. and fixed some incitations from brackets to [] brackets. Jaeha24 (talk) 07:23, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your feedback. We have corrected the citations and we have hyperlinked the words. We added to pictures but since theres not much information on the topic this is all I could find. Also every paragraph now has a citation at the end to show where that entire information came from. Hope this fixed all the mistakes of the article.Noor9279 (talk) 04:51, 4 December 2012 (UTC)