PSYC 2390 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Branch Point, Cortical Blindness, Melatonin

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2390
• Professor: Paula Barata

Document Summary

Lecture 9: sensation & perception, feb 9, 2016. Neural coding: from the eye to the brain (chap 3): important background concepts (continued) Retinal ganglion cells: review, there are two types, magna (large) and parvo (small) Things that are side by side in the retina are side by side in the world. The complication is, everything from the left visual field goes to the right side and vice versa. How does the brain signal information: specificity coding: Say we are coding the orientation of lines. Our brain is trying to send information about a vertical line. One way to do this is to have cells that only respond to vertical lines (it is specific to one stimulus) One cell responds to only one type of stimulus, and if the other kinds of stimulus are there, the cell just doesn"t care. One cell for one attribute: distributed coding. You look at the pattern of activity across a lot of cells.