Special Senses - Lecture 1 Flashcards
sensation from skin, muscles, bones, tendons and joints
somatosensation
somatic sensation is initiated by different types of sensory receptors called
somatic receptors
somatic means
relating to the body
Receptors exist for these 4 stimulus types
- touch & pressure
- posture & movement
- temperature
- pain
modality is what we percieve
after a stimulus
eg. light, sound, temperature, taste, pressure and smell
A sensation of the position of your different body parts and muscle contraction in space is called
proprioception or kinesthesia
Each different modality has it’s own specialized ________ _________ that generate graded potentials, which are small ___________. if there are enough of these, they can end up generating an _______ __________
sensory receptors
depolarizations
action potential
What do each of the following receptors respond to?
- Photoreceptors
- Mechanoreceptors
- Thermoreceptors
- Auditory receptors
- light
- pressure
- temperature
- sound
What are the 5 types of somatosensory receptors?
- Meissner’s corpuscles
- Merkel’s corpuscles
- Free neuron ending
- Pacinian corpuscles
- Ruffini corpuscles
How does Meissner’s and Merkel’s corpuscles adapt to the touch and pressure stimulus differently?
Meissner’s: rapidly adapting mechanoreceptor
Merkel’s: slowly adapting
sensory receptors can be located:
directly on the afferent fiber or on a specialized receptor cell
Rapidly adapting mechanoreceptors filter
unimportant information about touch and pressure out e.g. when sitting on a chair, or wearing a shirt
what is a cortical neuron
the smaller the receptive field, the better the _________ of the stimulus
localization
3 factors important for localization of site of a stimulus
- size of the receptive field
- density of sensory receptors
- overlapping receptive fields
