PSYA01H3 Chapter 5: Chapter Five Notes - Part one
Document Summary
Sensation: detection of simple properties of stimuli (brightness, colour, warmth, and sweetness) Perception: detection of objects (both animate and inanimate), their locations, their movements, and their backgrounds. Sense organs detect stimuli provided by light, sound, odour, taste, or mechanical contact with the environment. Transduction: process by which sense organs convert energy from environmental events into neural activity. In most sense: receptor cells (specialized neurons) release neurotransmitters that stimulate other neurons, altering the rate of firing of their axons. In somatosenses (body senses) dendrites of neurons respond directly to physical stimuli, without intervention of specialized receptor cells. Brain uses anatomical coding because it has no direct information about physical energy impringing on a given sense organ. Uses it to interpret location and type of sensory stimulus according to which incoming nerve fibres are active. Sensory coding for the body surface = anatomical.
