Sensory adaptation in psychology: features and description

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Man lives in the information environment. He is constantly bombarded with vital stimuli containing great information. A person sees, hears, feels, feels their physical properties, translates them into objects, into mental and behavioral statuses, placing them in their subconscious slides. The psyche itself and sensory adaptation are subjective-informational.

Life in information

Generator and receiver of knowledge, a person needs various tools to ensure the proper functioning of information. Some of these tools are precisely mental mechanisms for the primary processing of information. Through all this, he processes information, but everyone does it in his own way, having certain functions and experiences. Thanks to sensations, a person captures, records and performs the initial, rather simple processing of information. For their part, they are not available only to specific attributes. These are simple, isolated objects and phenomena that are notsufficient to ensure rapid adaptation to environmental requirements.

It may sound strange, but sensations are not as easy to define and distinguish from other psychological mechanisms as it seems at first glance. Thus, starting from the stimulus as a source of physical energy that activates the sense organs, it shows that the term "sensation" is used to describe the processes of the body to respond to stimuli. Or feel to stimulate sensory receptors and the transmission of sensory information to the central nervous system. Sensory adaptation and interaction of sensations is briefly defined as an elementary mental event resulting from the treatment of the central nervous system with information after stimulation of the sense organs.

Feelings and phenomena

These definitions are more general and non-specific, sterilized and confuse sensation with other processes by which the body responds to an action stimulus. Either they lower certain phenomena, such as arousal or elevated phenomena, such as perception. Psychologists view sensations as elementary forms of input in the regulation of actions that supplement ecological behavior. They exist when the effectiveness of stimulation is revealed on the basis of the overall reaction of the body, through a practical way of activity.

The form of behavior changes it when we could integrate the effect of stimulation into mental life, which regulates adaptation to external environmental conditions. Consequently,a distinct transition is made between excitement and sensation. Thus, if the excitation entails a change in the local reversible effect under the action of the stimulus, the sensation includes the sending of messages of nervous excitation. This is done in centers that have the ability to record experiences. Adaptation is provided by accompanying individual, and not just current tasks, providing such a global regulation of living beings.

Criteria and their classes

Over time, classification sensations and sensory adaptation in psychology consisted of several criteria.

• Morphological criterion - sensations were classified according to the senses, grouping them into five categories - visual, gustatory, olfactory, tactile and vestibular in accordance with the five senses. The tasks of morphological criteria associated with new scientific discoveries have led to the orientation of research towards other more realistic and operational classification criteria.

• Functional criterion - according to this criterion, first the sensory function is divided, and only then the detection (identification) of the receiving organ is performed.

• Criteria for the conditions and direction of reception - two classifications of sensations were proposed. The first is to distinguish between two types of recipients, namely contact receptors and distance receptors. Criterion of sensory detected damage - sensation is a dining mechanism, it is associated with the attributes of objects and phenomena that the bodyreflects. Due to this fact, the real attributes of objects and phenomena, and especially the connection between the subject and the object, took the first place in the classification of sensations. The nature of the received stimuli was taken as a guide, giving four categories of sensations. Thus, mechanical stimuli produce skin sensations, physical stimuli produce visual and auditory sensations, chemical stimuli produce sensations of taste and smell, and physiological stimuli produce sensations of other kinds.

• Criteria of specialization and sensational correlation - the criterion arose due to the need for a deeper and more differentiated analysis of sensations, as well as the need to connect and compare sensations between them.

Characterization of sensations

After the receiver has sensations: visual, olfactory, gustatory, skin (touch), and after we receive sensations that provide information about external objects and phenomena, they give us information about the position and movement of the body.

Aspects like all sensations, and sensory adaptation itself, with all appropriate variations, can be identified at the level of psychophysiological mechanisms, the properties that characterize them, the general laws that underlie them.

Physiological factors

Psychophysiological mechanisms of sensations. The relationship between the physiological and psychological side is so tight that it would hardly be possible to set any boundaries in the sensoryreceptor adaptation. Physiological to Psychological Transformation reveals physiological factors and says that sensations are areas where psychological research is in "the longest and happiest marriage to physiology." Many instances and mechanisms are involved in creating a sensation, each with specific roles.

The primary, multi-functional apparatus that promotes sensation is the analyzer, with various parts and functions. Its role is to transform the eternal or internal energy into consciousness, whether it be a simple phenomenon, such as sensation. To do this, he must provide a number of processes and mechanisms, the chain of which will eventually lead to the expected effect. The first psychophysiological mechanism of sensations is the reception of stimuli. He is one of the first to be managed by analytics. Its implementation involves both a number of auxiliary structures and the actual reception structures.

Peripheral links

The input of nerve input into the brain is the second mechanism associated with the production of sensations. The transmission of nerve influx to the brain occurs through associated fibers, less numerous than receptors. The most important mechanism for sensation is the interpretation of neural information by the brain. Sensation occurs in areas of the cortical projection of the analyzer, consisting of a central or primary part, called the core of the analyzer, and another, peripheral. Punishing the activity of peripheral links (receivers and effectors) is the ultimate mechanism of sensation.

Nervous system stimuli

They are created through the reverse link, which is the regulatory mechanism. These are higher levels and thresholds of sensations. Sensory adaptation of sensations controls the activity of receptors, requiring them to modify functional states in the sense of enhancing or eliminating excitability, selectivity depending on the instantaneous needs of the body (needs, expectations).

In this case, the receiver becomes an effector, because under the influence of command signals coming from the brain, it changes its functional state. The confrontation between the nerve-related afferents elicited by stimuli and their associated nerve tributaries ordered by the cerebral cortex allows for the correct reproduction of reality.