Bøger i Handbook of Sensory Physiology serien

Thus, Wiedemann's discovery, for instance, that the visual cells in each ommatidium of the dipterans have differing fields of vision has revived the question as to what the optical properties of individual visual cells, and the complete ommatidium, might be and how neighboring ommatidia interact.

Quite apart from its important role in the development of ophthalmology and related medical disciplines, the vertebrate eye is an exemplar of the ingenuity of living systems in adapting to the diverse and changing environments in which vertebrates have evolved.

The waterproof sensory sheet covering the mammalian body has a rich afferent innervation which provides an abundance of complex information for use by the central nervous system often in conjunction with information from receptors in the joints.

This volume on Visual Psychophysics documents the current status of research aimed toward understanding the intricacies of the visual mechanism and its laws of operation in intact human perceivers.

Even though the experimental approach differs, all studies are directed toward the solution of two basic problems: transduction in the photoreceptors and orga nization (often called "information processing") in the retina.

These classical but necessarily limited results were greatly extended by ROSE, GALAMBOS, and HUGHES (1959) in the cat cochlear nucleus and by KATSUKI and co-workers (KATSUKI et at.

This preface is addressed to the reader who wishes to inquire into the prevailing concepts, hypotheses and theories about development of sensory systems and wants to know how they are exemplified in the following chapters.

Taste receptors monitor the quality of all the food ingested. In recent years Zotterman and Diamant have successfully recorded from the human taste nerves as they pass through the middle ear. This allowed them to study the relationships between the response of taste receptors and the resultant taste sensation.

Although WITTMAACK'S explanation, which was frequently invoked in such reports, does no longer appear tenable, such apical-turn lesions could conceivably be caused by bone conduction components of high-intensity noise in the sense of BEKESY (1948).

This section will consider the structure and function of muscle receptors, as well as the central nervous system mechanisms with which they are concerned. With 99 Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . With 21 Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The function of the vestibular system is not as obvious as those of vision, hearing, touch or smell. It is probably for this reason that the vestibular sense was not discovered until the nineteenth century and that clinicians have continued to playa major role in basic vestibular research right up to the present.

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The present volume covers the physiology of the visual system beyond the optic nerve. These investigations began in the periphery: HARTLINE'S pioneering experiments on single visual elements of Limulus in 1932 started a successful period of neuronal recordings which ascended from the retina to the highest centres in the visual brain.

Olfaction is involved intimately in two of the most basic functions of animals: food intake and reproduction.