Explain the difference between a receptor potential and an action potential in a sensory system. Include how their electrophysiological properties change in response to changes in stimulus intensity.

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Nestor RutherfordLv2

16 Nov 2018

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Related questions

1. Why are sensory receptors good translators (i.e., what do they do)?

a What are the four types of sensory receptors and give an example for each?

b. How does lateral inhibition enhance the perception of a stimulus?

c ) Why is spatial preservation so important in the somatosensory system?

d) Hair cells transduce sound waves into action potentials via mechanoreception. They communicate intensity of sound (loudness) because they fire more action potentials when the stimulus is louder; however, they are not able to transduce information regarding the location of the sound in the environment. How is location of sound determined in the brain?

e) Describe the receptive field for a hair cell (hint, what makes a given hair cell fire an action potential?). What is the main characteristic of the basilar membrane that determines the specific receptive field for an individual hair cell?

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Animals use their sensory systems to acquire information about many diverse and behaviorally relevant stimuli, ranging from a preferred food item to an approaching predator or the song of a potential mate. In order to make adaptive decisions, animals must constantly make critical judgments about various features of the stimuli they encounter. One such general feature important in nearly all animal behaviors can be described as âstimulus intensityâ (e.g., how big is it, or how close is it, or how loud is it, or how bright is it?). This is a key feature of stimuli that an animalâs nervous system must encode. In a concise and well-informed essay that uses terms, concepts, and ideas from this course and discusses all relevant similarities and differences, describe how variation in stimulus intensity can be encoded in (i) postsynaptic potentials, (ii) action potentials, and (iii) compound action potentials.

In a single neuron, the amplitude of an action potential does not depend on the strength of the stimulus. However, in your experiment, as you increased the stimulus strength the amplitude of the response changed. Explain why