Lecture 3: touch

Question 1

Name the touch and pain receptors

Answer 1

• Nocireceptors
• Meissner’s corpuscles
• Merkel’s disks
• Pacinian corpuscles

Question 2

Name the proprioception receptors

Answer 2

• muscle spindles
• golgi tendon organs
• joint receptors

Question 3

What are mechanoreceptors

Answer 3

=below the surface of the skin, mediating perception of pressure, vibration and touch

Question 4

What do nocireceptors not have?

Answer 4

don’t have any structural specializations for converting stimulation into electrical responses

Question 5

What is transduction?

Answer 5

no structural specializations for converting stimulation into electrical responses. Known to mediate sensation of pain from tissue damage

Question 6

Pacinian corpuscles

Answer 6

• have onion like capsule in which thin layers are separated by fluid. Mechanical stimulation deforms the structure and leads to a response from the receptor
• able to vary their activity at a very high rate, allowing them to respond to high frequency vibration of the skin eg produced by the movement of fine textured surface across the skin

Question 7

Merk Disks and Ruffini’s corpuscles

Answer 7

• very sluggish temporal response

- best suited to signal relatively stable, unchanging mechanical stimulation

Question 8

What do proprioceptors do?

Answer 8

• determine where our body is in space

- using extraction and contraction of muscles

Question 9

Large muscles vs muscles for fine movement and muscle spindles

Answer 9

Large muscle that generate fairly coarse movements process relatively few muscle spindles, while muscles used for very fine accurate movement are well supplied with muscle spindles