4.3: Questions

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Chapter 4 Questions

1. What is the most basic sense?

2. Why is this sense necessary for the most primitive life-forms?

3. How are stretch-sensitive mechanosensory designs fundamentally different from photosensory and chemosensory mechanisms?

4. What is kinesthesia?

5. Lateral inhibition is a form of adaptation. What signal function does it accomplish?

6. How is a military fighter pilot like the green lacewing?

7. How is coarse coding manifested in the human auditory system?

8. What are the three middle-ear ossicles, and what is their function?

9. How are static and dynamic equilibrium changes sensed in the human auditory system?

10. Neurons can fire at most 1kHz, or at a rate of 1ms between action potentials. Nyquist sampling requires two samples per highest-frequency wave period, which means that such a neuronal firing rate can only encode up to 500 Hz. How is it that humans can discern components beyond 20 times that amount (10kHz)?

11. What were some of the significant results from Webb’s robotic implementation of cricket phonotaxis?

12. Why is it so amazing that we must “cut corners” in computational processing to get our electronic models to simulate real-time behavior of biological sensory systems?

13. What are the two information pathways in the auditory system of the barn owl?

14. How do first-order systems, such as differentiators and integrators, and second-order systems differ in their step responses?

15. What is the basic idea behind the “See-Hear” system?

16. What advantages does the MEMS-based silicon cochlea have over the analog VLSI-based silicon cochlea?

17. Define these terms:

phonotaxis –

pitch –

roll –

yaw –

azimuth –

elevation –

halteres –

dipteran –

pixel –

motion parallax –

MEMS –

Chapter 4 References:

[Andr01] Andreou, A. G., et al., “Heterogeneous Integration of Biomimetic Acoustic Microsystems”, IEEE Int. Sym. On Circuits and Systems, Vol. 3, 2001.

[Ayers02] Ayers, J., Davis, J., and Rudolph, A., Eds., Neurotechnology for Biomimetic Robots, MIT Press, ISBN: 0-262-01193-X, 2002.

[Kand81] Kandel, E. R. and Schwartz, J. H., Principles of Neural Sciences, Elsevier/North-Holland, New York, 1981.

[Lazz90] Lazzaro, J. and Mead, C., “A Silicon Model of Auditory Localization,” Chapter 8 in Zornetzer, S., Davis, J., and Lau, C., Eds., An Introduction to Neural and Electronic Networks, Academic Press, Inc., ISBN: 0-12-781881-2, 1990.

[Lyon89] Lyon, R. and Mead, C., “Electronic Cochlea”, Chapter 16 in Mead, C., Ed., Analog VLSI and Neural Systems, Addison-Wesley, ISBN: 0-201-05992-4, 1989.

[McGr02] McGruer, N. E., “Biomimetic Flow and Contact/Bending MEMs Sensors”, Chapter 1 in Ayers, J., Davis, J, and Rudolph, A, Eds., Neurotechnology for Biomimetic Robots, MIT Press, ISBN: 0-262-01193-X, 2002.

[Mead89] Mead, C., Analog VLSI and Neural Systems, Addison-Wesley, ISBN: 0-201-05992-4, 1989.

[North01] Northrop, R. B., Introduction to Dynamic Modeling of Neuro-Sensory Systems, CRC Press, ISBN: 0-8493-0814-3, 2001.

[Reese94] Reese, S. and Kenney, J., “Ultra-High Resolution, Biologically-Inspired Sonar”, in Proceedings of the 1994 Symposium on Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Technology, Ocean Engineering Society and IEEE, Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 1994.

[Smith08] Smith, C. U. M., Biology of Sensory Systems, 2^nd ed., John Wiley and Sons, ISBN: 978-0-470-51862-5, 2008.

[Tort84] Tortora, G. and Anagnostakos, N., Principles of Anatomy and Physiology, 4^th ed., Harper & Row Publishers, ISBN: 0-06-046656-1, 1984.

[Webb01] Webb, B., “A Spiking Neuron Controller for Robot Phonotaxix”, Chapter 1 in Webb, B., and Consi, T., Eds., Biorobotics Methods and Applications, AAAI Press/MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-73141-X, 2001.

[Webb02] Webb, B. and Harrison, R., “Phonotaxis in Crickets and Robots”, Chapter 26 in Ayers, J., Davis, J., and Rudolph, A., Eds., Neurotechnology for Biomimetic Robots, MIT Press, ISBN: 0-262-01193-X, 2002.