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“Outline the path the neural signals take when you see a cup of coffee on the table and pick it up. What pathway(s) is(are) involved when you drop it because it’s too hot?”
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INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY ESSAY I , TITLE I : “Outline the path the neural signals take when you see a cup of coffee on the table and pick it up. What pathway(s) is(are) involved when you drop it because it’s too hot?” J. D. GRIFFITHS UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK ESSAY I , TITLE I : “Outline the path the neural signals take when you see a cup of coffee on the table and pick it up. What pathway(s) is(are) involved when you drop it because it’s too hot? ” This situation describes two distinct types of neural response to a stimulus. The first involves the faculties of i) sense (specifically visual) perception; “…See a cup of coffee…” and ii) information processing, or cognition “…pick it up…”, - which necessarily implies an aspect of decision making following the perceptual event – resulting in voluntary movement through the formulation and execution of an suitable motor programme for the task. The second type of process mentioned is a reflex action, “…drop it because it’s too hot…”; an involuntary muscular contraction, acting as a natural defensive reaction to an immediately harmful situation (in this case extreme heat). Chronological Analysis of events: Seeing and picking up the cup The image of the coffee cup is translated into coded action potentials and directed to the dorsal and ventral streams in the brain like so: Photons, units of light radiation, are reflected by object surfaces into the eye to create the visual field. These collide with photosensitive rhodopsin and opsin pigment molecules in rod and cone cells respectively in the retina (the groundbreaking study of which earned George Wald the 1967 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine) (Rozenweig et al, 1999). Excitation and subsequent molecular alteration of the pigments causes an opening of membrane protein channels, allowing an influx of sodium ions. This depolarization establishes a generator potential sufficient to initiate an action potential in synapsing bipolar cell(s), which in turn synapse with retinal ganglia.
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