Questions for Sensory Systems: General, Vision, Hearing

    1. What are the basic properties of sensory receptors? Give an example of each.

2. What specifically is sensory transduction? Think about this on the level of individual sensory cells from the general senses, vision, and hearing and the mechanics in each case. What is the actual site of sensory transduction in each?
 
3. How is information about stimulus intensity conveyed to the CNS?

4. Why is it that the visual system of an insect generates an image much like a computer monitor and that of a vertebrate or cephalopod is more like a camera? What are the terms for these two types of eyes and what is the relevant anatomy for image formation in each case?

5. Where is light bent the most in a terrestrial vertebrate’s eye? Would you expect the same thing for the eye of a fish? Why or why not? What needs to happen for an image to be formed in a vertebrate’s eye? How is this accomplished?

6. Why is it not surprising that our eye (and that of other vertebrates) has integrative capabilities?

7. What is sensory adaptation? Give an example of this.

8. What is two-point discrimination? Could you get clues to what the two-point discrimination was for a given part of the body by studying the brain itself? Where would you look and what would you see?

9. What is weird about the way the vertebrate eye is structured? What are two consequences of this odd structure?

10. What two types of information are present in a sound? How are these two types of information encoded (i.e., transduced) into neural signals and where does this encoding take place?

12.  The reception of smells like those of cheese and of pheromones is different for a mouse.  What do I mean by this?  Think in terms of the receptors the compounds bind, the specific structures this binding takes place in/on, what the first part of the nervous system to receive the information is, and where the information goes from that point in a general sense (what major brain areas).