PSYCH 240 Lecture 3: Lecture 3 Notes
Document Summary
It"s a beautiful thing: we can move through the world, see all these beautiful colors, etc. , etc, very complicated to get a robot to do what we do (system is very complicated) What principles are common to all sensory/perceptual systems: transduction: from physical to neural. Ex: taking energy and light and changing that into action potentials. Action potentials are used by neurons within the body: neural coding. Coding for stimuli (quantitative and qualitative data about these stimuli: interactivity. Bottom up is direct sensing, top-down is past knowledge (look at lecture two: sensory principle 1: transduction, b (target) is affected by a (prime) Senses must convert physical stimulus energy (chemical molecules) into electrical changes in nerve receptor cells. Rods and cones are the receptor cells for the visual system: rods are useful for detecting motion at low levels of illumination, cones help visual acuity (like reading) and colors. They respond to certain wavelengths of light: sensory principle 2: neural coding.
