Topic: perceptual generalization

Animals depend on their senses for survival. Mice, who rely on olfaction to navigate the world, can rapidly identify odors within a single sniff across a wide range of concentrations. In the mouse olfactory bulb (OB), mitral and tufted cells (MTCs) respond to odors by changing both the rate and timing of spikes relative to inhalation, resulting in reliable, odor specific sequences that evolve over a single sniff. However, it remains unknown how sequential MTC activity is organized. Specifically, what defines the order in which MTCs fire, and what information is encoded in these sequences? To a

Animals encode sensory stimuli with precisely timed activity across modalities. For example, mice can rapidly recognize odors, independent of their concentration, based on complex spatiotemporal patterns of mitral and tufted cell (MTC) activity in the olfactory bulb. Yet, it remains unknown how sequential MTC activity is organized, and what role sequential activity plays in guiding perception. Here, we performed fast 2-photon calcium imaging of hundreds of MTCs with sub-sniff temporal resolution to a battery of odors. We constructed a space of MTC tuning using the pairwise correlations between