Question

What are some advantages and disadvantages of sensory adaptation?

Answer 1

Answer: You cannot feel as much so that can be a problem if you get injured but it does help you better understand your surroundings

Explanation: Sensory adaptation refers to a reduction in sensitivity to a stimulus after constant exposure to it. While sensory adaptation reduces our awareness of a constant stimulus, it helps free up our attention and resources to attend to other stimuli in the environment around us.

Answer 2

Sensory evaluation makes use of the remarkable virtuosity and range of the human senses as a multi‐purpose instrument for measuring the sensory characteristics of foods. The brain protects itself from an overload of information from the senses by two processes: feature extraction and adaptation. The former involves information reduction by the extraction of selected features from the environment; these form the basis for the reconstruction of the percept in consciousness. The latter, adaptation, involves the attenuation of repetitive and constant input so as not to overload the brain with redundant information.

The effects of adaptation can be observed for all senses. For the chemical senses, the effect is that a constant odor or taste stimulus will be perceived as decreasing in intensity while sensitivity to that stimulus is also decreased. For sensory evaluation, this poses problems. It means that a taste or odor has a tendency to vanish while it is being observed and that sensitivity to subsequent stimuli will be altered. Such sensitivity drift in the human instrument must be anticipated in the design of measurement procedures for the sensory evaluation of food.

Step-by-step explanation: