Taste & Smell:Psychology
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- To which areas of the body is the somatosensory cortex primarily devoted?
- fingers, lips and tongue
- Describe the physiological process which occurs in order to feel hot and cold.
- When skin temp is normal, the warmth and cold receptors fire spontaneously, without stimulating any noticeable sensation. If heat is applied, "w" receptors fire more rapidly than, and "c" receptors cease their spontaneous firing.The application of cold produces the opposite pattern of neural activity.
- Tactile feature detectors?
- Similar to visual feature detectors these receptors respond to specific types of touch, such as movement across the skin in a particular direction.
- Describe taste cells
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-short life span (10days)
New cells are born at the end of the taste bud and migrate inward toward the centre to die. - Where do signals from the thermal receptors go?
- they travel via the spinal cord to the brain along a pathway that is shared with pain signals but that is seperate from the pathway for tactile stimulation.
- 4 primary tastes.
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sweet, sour, bitter, and salty
Most taste cells can respond to more than one, but are specifically geared towards one in particular.
- Describe the sensory receptors which regulate temperature.
- These are sensory recpetors with free nerve endings. They initiate specific signals along nerve fibres specific for warm and cold.
- Gustatory System
- The sensory system for taste.
- Skin: Tactile Localization
- Cells in the NS are set up to meet this need. Specific cells are set up to recieve info from specific patches of skin. Patches tend to involve centre-surround arrangement.
- Olfactory System
- The sensory system for smell.
- Tactile Pathway
- Nerve fibres carry info from the spinal cord to the brain stem. Most cross over so that opposite side of brain recieves tactile stimulation info. The tactile pathway then projects via the thalamus and onto the somatosensory cortex in the brain's parietal lobe.
- Physical stimuli for smell?
- Volatile chemical substances that can evaporate into the air and disolve into fluid (mucus in the nose).
- Describe the physical stimuli of touch.
- They are mechanical, thermal and chemical, and they impinge upon the skin. Human skin has atleast 6 types of resensory receptors, which tend to be specialized for different functions.
- What does flavor perception depend on?
- A mixture of texture, appearance, and odor of food.
- Describe the centre-surround arrangement.
- Stimuli falling in the centre produce the opposite effect of stimuli falling in the surrounding area.
- Describe smell receptors.
- The receptors of smell are olfactory cilia, hairlike structures located in the upper portion of the nasal passages.
- Types of odors?
- Can't be categorized like taste. Most olfactory cells respond to a variety of odors, and presumably each type of smell is a result of some combo.
- Describe gustatory sensation.
- The physical stimuli for the sense of taste are chemical substances that are soluble (dissolveable in water). The gustatory receptors are clusters of taste cells found in the taste buds that line the trenches around tiny bumps on the tongue. When these cells absorb chemicals dissolved in saliva, they trigger neural impulses that are routed through the thalamus to the cortex.
- Describe smell cells, in relation to taste cells.
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Similar to taste cells, smell cells have a short life and are constantly being replaced. The olfactory receptors have axons that synapse directly with cells in the olfactory bulb at the base of the brain.
**Smell is the only sensory system that is not routed via the thalamus before it projects to the cortex.