by extraretinal factors in addition to the nature of the stimulus in their receptive field. These factors include attention, working memory, and stimulus salience. Thus the ventral stream does not merely provide a description of the elements in the visual world—it also plays a crucial role in judging the significance of these elements. Damage to the ventral stream can cause inability to recognize faces or interpret facial expression. Two auditory systems Ventral stream Along with the visual ventral pathway being important for visual processing, there is also a ventral auditory pathway emerging from the primary auditory cortex. In this pathway, phonemes are processed posteriorly to syllables and environmental sounds. The information then joins the visual ventral stream at the middle temporal gyrus and temporal pole. Here the auditory objects are converted into audio-visual concepts. Dorsal stream The function of the auditory dorsal pathway is to map the auditory sensory representations onto articulatory motor representations. Hickok & Poeppel claim that the auditory dorsal pathway is necessary because, "learning to speak is essentially a motor learning task. The primary input to this is sensory, speech in particular. So, there must be a neural mechanism that both codes and maintains instances of speech sounds, and can use these sensory traces to guide the tuning of speech gestures so that the sounds are accurately reproduced." In contrast to the ventral stream's auditory processing, information enters from the primary auditory cortex into the posterior superior temporal gyrus and posterior superior temporal sulcus. From there the information moves to the beginning of the dorsal pathway, which is located at the boundary of the temporal and parietal lobes near the Sylvian fissure. The first step of the dorsal pathway begins in the sensorimotor interface, located in the left Sylvian parietal temporal (Spt) (within the Sylvian fissure at the parietal-temporal boundary). The spt is important for perceiving and reproducing sounds. This is evident because its ability to acquire new vocabulary, be disrupted by lesions and auditory feedback on speech production, articulatory decline in late-onset deafness and the non-phonological residue of Wernicke's aphasia; deficient self-monitoring. It is also important for the basic neuronal mechanisms for phonological short-term memory. Without the Spt, language acquisition is impaired. The information then moves onto the articulatory network, which is divided into two separate parts. The articulatory network 1, which processes motor syllable programs, is located in the left posterior inferior temporal gyrus and