PSYC 2410 Chapter 71: Chapter 7 1st half.docx

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2410
• Professor: Boyer Winters

Document Summary

Chapter 7: mechanisms of perception: hearing, touch, smell, taste, and attention. This chapter focuses on four of the five exteroceptive sensory systems: auditory (hearing), somatosensory (touch), olfactory (smell), and gustatory (taste) The sensory areas of the cortex are considered to be of three fundamentally different types: primary, secondary, and association. The primary sensory cortex of a system is the area of sensory cortex that receives most of its input directly from the thalamic relay nuclei of that system. Association cortex is any area of cortex that receives input from more than one sensory system. Most input to areas of association cortex comes via areas of secondary sensory cortex. The organization among these three types of sensory cortex and among other sensory structures are characterized by three major principles: hierarchical organization, functional aggregation, and parallel processing. A hierarchial is a system whose members can be assigned to specific levels or ranks in relation to one another.