Discuss the process of sensory analysis, and explain how it is both innate and influenced by early experiences by describing the studies conducted by Blakemore and Cooper

What will be an ideal response?

ANSWER: Answer will explain that what we experience is influenced by sensory analysis. As our senses process information, they divide the world into important perceptual features, or basic stimulus patterns. The visual system, for example, has a set of feature detectors that are attuned to very specific stimuli, such as lines, shapes, edges, spots, colors, and other patterns Although our sensitivity to perceptual features is an innate characteristic of the nervous system, it is also influenced by experiences early in life. For instance, Colin Blakemore and Graham Cooper of Cambridge University raised kittens in a room with only vertical stripes on the walls. Another set of kittens saw only horizontal stripes. When returned to normal environments, the "horizontal" cats could easily jump onto a chair, but when walking on the floor, they bumped into chair legs. "Vertical" cats, on the other hand, easily avoided chair legs, but they missed when trying to jump to horizontal surfaces. The cats raised with vertical stripes were "blind" to horizontal lines, and the "horizontal" cats acted as if vertical lines were invisible. Other experiments show that there is an actual decrease in brain cells tuned to the missing features.