Week 15 — Capture, Then Convert: A Special-Senses Key Report — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Human Anatomy and Physiology I Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 14 of the term — count the special-senses key, put the light path and the ossicles in order, choose the right structure for three puzzling moments, and explain to someone new why food tastes flat during a cold.

This week you learned that every sense organ captures a stimulus and then converts it into a nerve signal, how receptors sort into five classes, how light travels through the eye and sound through the ear, how the inner ear splits hearing from balance, and why flavor is mostly smell. Week 6 showed that the skin senses touch, surface temperature, and pain, and Week 13 placed vision in the occipital lobe and hearing in the temporal lobe; this week you follow light, sound, head motion, and chemicals into the sense organs that capture and convert them. In this assignment you work four short counting problems, interpret each one, choose the right structure for three puzzling moments, and explain flavor to someone who has never studied anatomy and physiology. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and A&P Lab & Inquiry practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

This week's shared dataset is the special-senses key: canonical structures, orders, and counts, with no measured data. There are 5 receptor classes (chemoreceptor, mechanoreceptor, photoreceptor, thermoreceptor, nociceptor); light passes 4 structures (cornea → pupil → lens → retina); sound passes 6 structures from the eardrum (tympanic membrane → malleus → incus → stapes → oval window → cochlea); each ear holds 3 ossicles; and taste buds respond to 5 basic tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami).

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

Light passes 4 structures on its path through the eye, and the last one converts it into a nerve signal. How many structures come before the conversion?
From the eardrum, sound passes 1 tympanic membrane, 3 ossicles, 1 oval window, and 1 cochlea. How many structures does it pass in all?
The skin carries 3 receptor classes for touch, temperature, and pain, and the special senses add 2 more classes, one for light and one for chemicals. How many receptor classes is that in all?
The special-senses key counts 5 receptor classes, 4 light-path structures, 6 sound-path structures, 3 ossicles in each ear, and 5 basic tastes. How many items does the key hold in all?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

Problem 1: list the light path in order, and say which two structures share the focusing and which one changes shape for near and far objects.
Problem 2: name the ossicles in order from the eardrum, and say where the vibration becomes a nerve signal and which receptor class does that work.
Problem 3: name the skin's three receptor classes with the stimulus each one detects, and name the two classes the special senses add with one sense that uses each.
Problem 4 (choose the tool): this is the last assignment of the term, so it asks you to choose among methods you already know. For each of three made-up moments — a dark room where a red shirt and a blue shirt look the same gray, a room that keeps spinning after an office chair stops, and a dot that vanishes on the dot-and-cross card — choose which of this week's tools explains it (rods versus cones, the cochlea versus the semicircular canals, or the optic disc and the blind spot), justify the choice from the moment itself, and say why one plausible alternative fits less well.

Explain it to a non-expert

A relative says, "Every time I catch a cold, my food tastes like cardboard. Is my tongue broken?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, that the taste buds still respond to the five basic tastes, that a blocked nose keeps a food's aroma from reaching the smell receptors high in the nose, and that flavor is mostly smell. Name one limit, for example that this message is about how the senses work and is not a diagnosis of anyone. Put any technical term in everyday words. More than one good message is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a cousin who asks why hot sauce is not on the list of basic tastes. Model answer: "Your tongue has taste buds that report five basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, which is the savory one. The burn from hot sauce comes through a different kind of signal, one for pain and temperature, so it is not one of those five tastes. This is a simplified classroom picture, and it does not explain why some people enjoy the burn more than others."

Use that pattern for the message to your relative, with your own wording and evidence.

Looking ahead to the final

This is the last assignment before Week 16, which holds the cumulative final exam and no new material. The finals-week module carries a study guide, a practice exam, and an exam-prep tutorial. The choose-the-tool habit you practise in Problem 4 is the same move those materials ask for across the whole course: read the situation, name the structure or process it points to, and rule out the tempting alternative.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to rebuild every count you report from the numbers given, without guessing which numbers you used or which operation you chose.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
your message to your relative, explaining that the taste buds still work during a cold, that the aroma is blocked, that flavor is mostly smell, and one limit; and
a one-line restatement of the counts you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labeled sketch of the eye and the ear with the light and sound paths marked and a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counts, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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