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Sensory Processing Analysis

Decent Essays

Themes of Sensory Processing Introduction Humans have five means of sensing information, which are hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and seeing (Breedlove & Watson, 2013). All incoming information is sensed in a similar way for each of the five modalities. The sensory receptor organs filter the information that we come into contact with by deciding which information to pay attention to and which information to ignore. The event that activates the sensory organ is referred to as a stimulus; hence, feeling a finger on your arm, hearing music, or seeing an object are all referred to as stimuli. Additionally, we have receptor cells within or sensory organs, the receptor cells perceive specific types of simulation and convert the sensed stimuli …show more content…

The sensory systems select information to send to the brain about experienced internal and external events (Breedlove & Watson, 2013). Some of the sensed stimuli are readily detected by some species, but not others. The sensory receptor organs have a role in which they select which sensed information is sent to the brain and which information is disregard. Energy is then transduced at the sensory receptor cites by the production of a receptor potential that triggers action potentials. Information is translated from the receptors into patterns of neural activity later during the coding process. The action potentials vary in frequency and pattern and the specific frequencies and patterns of the action potentials signal how intense the stimulus was that was encountered. The sequence of the levels in the sensory pathways allow for progressively elaborate processing of the information. The information then enters the central nervous system, via either the spinal cord or the brain, and then the information reaches the thalamus of the brain, where the information is processed and communicated to the cortex. In summary, the sensory information first enters the central nervous system via the cranial and peripheral nerves, and then eventual reaches the thalamus prior to being sent on to the primary sensory cortex. The primary sensory cortex passes the information along to the non-primary sensory cortex. Every …show more content…

Throughout the research for this course I have come to believe that the auditory and olfactory sensory processes are the most

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