Topic: olfaction

For many animals, the sense of olfaction plays a major role in controlling sexual behaviors. Olfaction helps animals to detect mates, discriminate their status, and ultimately, decide on their behavioral output such as courtship behavior or aggression. Specific pheromone cues and receptors have provided a useful model to study how sensory inputs are converted into certain behavioral outputs. With the aid of recent advances in tools to record and manipulate genetically defined neurons, our understanding of the neural basis of sexual and social behavior has expanded substantially. I will discuss

Olfaction facilitates a large variety of animal behaviors such as feeding, mating, and communication. In the mammal olfactory system, the olfactory bulb (OB) and piriform cortex (PCx) are responsible for preliminary odor encoding and corresponding memory storage respectively. Recent evidence demonstrated the dynamic nature of OB and PCx odor representations upon frequent repetition of the same odors over days, and this phenomenon, termed representational drift, should be the consequence of highly plastic nature of biologically constrained synapses in the olfactory system. In this work, we buil

Odor naming is considered as a particularly challenging task. In free odor naming scenarios people often fail to respond with any linguistic label to certain odors they smell, resulting in what is called an omission (i.e., a lack of response). The cognitive demands and the nature of interactions between olfaction and language related brain’s neural resources are not well understood [1]. Behavioral task: the data that we used to compare our model output were collected from a Swedish National Study on Aging and Care in Kungsholmen (SNAC-K), where ~2500 subjects underwent an odor naming test of