Question

1. How might biology and environment combine to affect the physical growth of a child adopted as an infant from a developing country and reared in a more industrialized one?

2. What do you think Pablo Picasso meant when he said, “it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like children”? Are there other things adults can learn from children?

3. Given the way the brain and nervous system develop, what sort of sensory environment would probably be most conducive to healthy neural development in the infant? Why?

4. Are the processes of sensation and perception always linked? Is it possible to sense with- out perceiving? To perceive without sensing. How?

Answer 1

• 4.Sensation and perception overlap each other.Sensation is the body's detection of external or internal stimulation (e.g., eyes detecting light waves, ears detecting sound waves). Perception utilizes the brain to make sense of the stimulation (e.g., seeing a chair, hearing a guitar).
• Sensation involves 3 steps:
• a)Sensory receptors detect stimuli
• b)Sensory stimuli are transduced into electrical impulses to be decoded by the brain
• c)Electrical impulses move down neural pathways to specific parts of the brain wherein the impulses are decoded into useful information i.e. perception.So perception is the final stage of sensation, when sensory signals become useful for guiding actions and/or cognition.
• Sensation without perception would presumably then involve only steps a and b. The signals arrive at the brain but are not ‘decoded’. This is possible if, for example, attention prevents a signal from traveling to certain parts of the brain.
• If sensory signals are the key initial step in perception, then there can be no perception without sensation. However, if we choose to define perception in such a way that hallucination and imagination are included, then clearly we can have perception without sensation.
• Sensation and perception are elements that balance and complement one another. They work together for us to be able to identify and create meaning from stimuli-related information.Without sensation, perception will not be possible, except for people who believe in extrasensory perception or ESP. And without perception, our sensations would remain to be "unknown" to us since there is no mental processing of what we sense.
• Due to time limit,remaining questions can be asked as another question,they will be answered,thankyou for your cooperation