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Type your answer to each question directly below the question. This assignment r

ID: 3493289 • Letter: T

Question

Type your answer to each question directly below the question. This assignment requires Level 1 Writing Guidelines. 1. Define the following terms and give an example of each: transduction, threshold, sensory adaptation. Please include references Sensation and Perception The saying goes, "Seeing is believing," but then again, people don't always see the same thing. Our ears, eyes, and other senses can all play tricks on us. The Muller- Lyer illusion is one example of that. Sensations are just a random mix of sights and sounds, tastes and smells that provide little meaning in and of themselves. When you construct a representation of the outside world inside your head, you select, organize and interpret these sensations, transforming them into perceptions that create meaning. It is this process that can result in differences in perception. This lesson will cover stimulation, transduction, sensation, and perception. Each of these is part of a process that all of us goes through multiple times a day without even thinking about it.

Explanation / Answer

1. Transduction - Transduction is defined as the physiological process wherein sensors in the body convert physical signals from the environment and encode it into neural signals sent to the central nervous system (Schacter et al., 2010). For example, our ears receive energy (sound waves) and transduce (or convert) this energy into neural messages that make their way to the brain and are processed as sounds.

2. Threshold - In psychophysics, threshold is the weakest stimulus that can be organism can detect (Smith, 2008). For instance, a faint sound from a far away source that can barely be heard, but is still processed by the organism when paying close attention.

3. Sensory adaptation - Sensory adaptation is a change over time in the responsiveness of the sensory system to a constant stimulus. It is usually experienced as a change in the stimulus (Dougherty et al., 2005). For example, when one enters a room with really loud music, at first one is overwhelmed by the loudness of the sound. But after a while, the ears adapted to the high volume and this is not perceived at such a high strength anymore.

References:

Dougherty, D. P.; Wright, G. A.; Yew, A. C. (2005). "Computational model of the cAMP-mediated sensory response and calcium-dependent adaptation in vertebrate olfactory receptor neurons". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102 (30): 10415–20.

Schacter, D. L., Gilbert, D. T., & Wegner, D. M. (2010). Psychology. (2nd ed.). New York: Worth Pub.

Smith, Christopher U. M. (20 November 2008). Biology of Sensory Systems. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 34–5.