Categories › Neurodivergence
Category
Neurodivergence
Person–environment fit, compensation, executive and sensory profiles, adaptive function, and the boundaries of accommodation.
Terms
Person–environment fitThe degree to which an individual’s cognitive, sensory, social, and regulatory profile matches the demands and affordances of an environment.
Demand–capacity mismatchA condition in which environmental demands exceed available attentional, executive, sensory, social, or adaptive capacities.
Executive function / dysfunctionA family of capacities including inhibition, working memory, switching, planning, initiation, and prospective organization rather than one unitary ability.
Sensory hyperreactivity / hyporeactivity / seekingDifferent patterns of sensory response that can produce highly context-dependent functional consequences.
Camouflaging / maskingStrategies that reduce the visibility of underlying social or behavioral differences, potentially making outward performance a poor proxy for internal effort.
Compensation versus remediationThe distinction between achieving acceptable performance through alternative strategies and changing the underlying difficulty itself.
Adaptive functioning versus cognitive abilityThe distinction between measured cognitive capacity and reliable day-to-day independence or task execution.
Spiky profile / intra-individual variabilityA pattern of pronounced strengths and weaknesses within the same person that makes global functioning labels lossy.
MonotropismA theory emphasizing strongly concentrated allocation of attention and interests, increasingly discussed in autism research but less established than core clinical constructs.
Double empathy problemA proposal that some autistic–non-autistic communication failures arise bidirectionally from mismatched experience and communication rather than from a one-sided deficit alone.
Autistic burnoutAn emerging construct describing prolonged exhaustion and increased functional difficulty reported by some autistic people.
Diagnostic compensationCases where strong verbal ability, intelligence, learned scripts, or supportive environments partly obscure diagnostically relevant difficulty.
Context-dependent disabilityA framing in which impairment can vary sharply with sensory, executive, social, scheduling, or environmental demands.
Accommodation versus fundamental task requirementThe distinction between removing incidental barriers and changing a capability that is genuinely intrinsic to the underlying task.
Floor / ceiling effectMeasurement failure when a test cannot discriminate meaningfully among people clustered near its lower or upper limits.
Research trail
This category page is a wiki-authored organizing layer. Follow individual term pages for supplied sources, provenance notes, related concepts, and reading trails.