the grade only

Possible questions from chapter 11:

1. Determining the azimuth of a sound source often depends on two cues. Describe the two cues and explain why they arise.

2. What is an auditory scene? How does the auditory system segregate the auditory scene into auditory streams?

Possible questions from chapter 12:

1. When one hears a foreign language that they do not know, the words seem to all run together. Why is that? How does the auditory system solve this problem for languages that one is familiar with?

2. Two notes are played simultaneously on a piano. They do not sound pleasing together. Explain why. If the two notes were played on an instrument in which the amplitude of the second and higher harmonics were all 0, would they sound more or less pleasing? Why?

Possible questions from chapter 13:

1. Area 51 of Edwards Air Force Base in Nevada is where the United States government keeps all of the flying saucers and aliens that they have captured. What I am going to say is top-secret and probably would get me into a lot of trouble if you told anyone that I told you about this. So hush-hush. When I was there, I examined the skin of an alien that was from Betelgeuse, a star system in the constellation Orion. Other than being bright red and somewhat more hairy, the alien’s skin superficially looked similar to human skin. But on closer examination, I noticed a couple of differences – the epidermis was quite a bit thicker than human skin and the upper part of the dermis was completely devoid of mechanoreceptors – all of the alien’s mechanoreceptors were found very deep in its dermis. If the alien’s somatosensory system was otherwise the same as a human’s, how would these differences affect the alien’s ability to interact with a tactile world?

2. Sometimes people can experience extreme trauma to their body, yet perceive very little pain (assume that they are not taking analgesic drugs and there has been no damage to the central nervous system). Using an accepted theory of pain perception, explain how this experience might arise.

Possible questions from chapter 14:

1. A science fiction film has a humanoid species that spends its entire life underground and in the dark. Since there is no light in its environment, it never developed a visual system. Instead, it primarily relies on its olfactory system. Because the film director wants the species to be as realistic as possible, she has asked for your advice on how the species’ olfactory system would likely be different from a human’s. What is your advice to the director?

2. In all of the previous sensory systems, sensory information was sent to the thalamus before being sent on toward the cortex. Olfactory information initially skips the thalamus as it projects directly from the olfactory bulb to the cortex and only later returns to the thalamus. From an evolutionary or a functional perspective, explain why you think the olfactory system is fundamentally different in this respect from other sensory systems

Possible question from chapter 15:

1. Flavor is a complex amalgamation of many different sensory experiences. Describe and discuss three different factors that influence flavor.

Possible integrative questions from the course:

1. Compare and contrast vision and another sensory / perceptual system. Describe two non-trivial similarities of the two systems. Describe two non-trivial differences of the two systems. “Non-trivial” implies that you should not say something like “vision senses light while audition senses sound” or “vision uses the eyes while audition uses the ears.” You need to demonstrate that you have at least an undergraduate level of understanding of the sensation and perception involved in the two systems; that is, your answer should be more involved than common sense or common knowledge.

2. Which sense would you give up if you had to give one up? Why? Describe how other sensory systems might compensate for the loss of the sense. You need to demonstrate that you have at least an undergraduate level of understanding of the sensation and perception involved in your answer; that is, your answer should be more involved than common sense or common knowledge.