PSY-200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Nociception, Somatosensory System, Taste

• School: University of Tampa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY-200
• Professor: Jordan Litman

Document Summary

Sensation: the detection and reception of sensory signals from the environment and their transduction into neural activity. Translating physical energy (. g. waves of light or sound) into neural information. Perception: the processes through which sensory signals are interpreted/represented as meaningful experiences. We have chemoreceptors, mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors (heat), and photoreceptors (light) (other broader or specialized category labels crop up too) We"ll focus on the following seven sensory-perceptual processes. Nociception, olfaction, gustation, somatosensation, kinesthetic and vestibular sensation, audition, and vision. It can be difficult to perfectly tease the two sets of processes completely apart. In general, lower levels are studied more as physiological processes and higer levels are studied more as cognitive (i. e. mental) processes. Activity of sensory neurons in response to sensory stimulation. Organization of neural information into low level percept (i. e. color, lines, dots, pitch, etc) Recognition of objects (e. g. letters from lines, words from sounds) Parsing of objects, perception of depth, distance, similarity.