Topic: odor-discrimination task

Estimating the statistics of events occurring around us is a crucial feature for survival. However, how the brain achieves this is poorly understood. We devised an odor-discrimination task in which mice could utilize preceding odor cues to estimate the probability of encountering a followed rewarded or non-rewarded odor. Recording the neural activity during task performance in the primary olfactory cortex, we found two non-overlapping neuronal subpopulations that encoded the odor-probability contingencies. One subset of neurons ramped its firing rate between the cue and the predicted odor onse