The Rattlesnake Strike: The Role of Sensory Receptors

在不到半秒的时间里，响尾蛇瞄准，传递，并释放它对自然猎物的正常攻击。这种正常的进食行为的成功，也就是响尾蛇的生存，关键在于视觉和特殊的热敏器官，即面部凹陷的使用。Kardong博士的研究目的是发现，如果眼睛或热敏窝不可用，蛇的中枢神经系统在补偿方面可能有多熟练。为了确定感觉信息的缺失如何影响响尾蛇的捕食性攻击，Kardong博士将进行实验，其中每一个感觉器官都被暂时覆盖，并详细描述随后的攻击。这项研究有可能有助于了解脊椎动物神经系统如何处理传入的信息。具体来说，Kardong博士的实验结果将涉及神经系统如何处理来自几个不同感官来源的并行信息以及如何补偿缺失信息的重要问题。

Within less than half a second, the rattlesnake aims, delivers, and releases its normal strike at natural prey. Central to the success of this normal feeding behavior, and thus to the rattlesnake's very survival, is the use of sight and of special heat-sensitive organs, the facial pits. The purpose of Dr. Kardong's research is to discover how adept the snake's central nervous system might be at compensating if the eyes or the heat-sensitive pit were unavailable. In order to determine how the absence of sensory information might affect the rattlesnake's predatory strike, Dr. Kardong will carry out experiments in which each of these sense organs is temporarily covered and the ensuing strike is described in detail. This research has the potential to contribute to understanding how the vertebrate nervous system processes incoming information. Specifically, the results of Dr. Kardong's experiments will bear on the important questions of how the nervous system processes parallel information from several different sensory sources and how it might compensate for missing information.