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Olfactory perceptual stability and discrimination

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Abstract

No two roses smell exactly alike, but our brain accurately bundles these variations into a single percept 'rose'. We found that ensembles of rat olfactory bulb neurons decorrelate complex mixtures that vary by as little as a single missing component, whereas olfactory (piriform) cortical neural ensembles perform pattern completion in response to an absent component, essentially filling in the missing information and allowing perceptual stability. This piriform cortical ensemble activity predicts olfactory perception.

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Figure 1: Odor discrimination and stability.
Figure 2: Piriform cortical ensembles predict behavioral discrimination.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by grant R01-DC03906 to D.A.W. and grant R01-DC008982 to R.L.R and D.A.W. from the US National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders.

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Author notes

  1. Donald A Wilson

    Present address: Present addresses: Emotional Brain Institute, Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, 140 Old Orangeburg Road, Orangeburg, New York 10962, USA; Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10016 (D.A.W.).,

  2. Dylan C Barnes and Rylon D Hofacer: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology, Neurobehavioral Institute, University of Oklahoma, 730 Van Vleet Oval, Norman, 73019, Oklahoma, USA

    Dylan C Barnes, Rylon D Hofacer, Ashiq R Zaman & Donald A Wilson

  2. Neural Engineering Lab, School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, University of Oklahoma, 865 Asp Avenue, Norman, 73019, Oklahoma, USA

    Robert L Rennaker

Authors
  1. Dylan C Barnes
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  2. Rylon D Hofacer
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  3. Ashiq R Zaman
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  4. Robert L Rennaker
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  5. Donald A Wilson
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Contributions

D.C.B., R.D.H., A.R.Z., R.L.R. and D.A.W. collected and analyzed the data. D.A.W. designed the experiments and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Donald A Wilson.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1 and 2, Supplementary Tables 1 and 2, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Results (PDF 849 kb)

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Barnes, D., Hofacer, R., Zaman, A. et al. Olfactory perceptual stability and discrimination. Nat Neurosci 11, 1378–1380 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2217

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2217

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