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Humans and Mice Express Similar Olfactory Preferences

In humans, the pleasantness of odors is a major contributor to social relationships and food intake. Smells evoke attraction and repulsion responses, reflecting the hedonic value of the odorant. While olfactory preferences are known to be strongly modulated by experience and learning, it has been re...

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Autores principales: Mandairon, Nathalie, Poncelet, Johan, Bensafi, Moustafa, Didier, Anne
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2009
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2615132/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19148286
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004209
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author Mandairon, Nathalie
Poncelet, Johan
Bensafi, Moustafa
Didier, Anne
author_facet Mandairon, Nathalie
Poncelet, Johan
Bensafi, Moustafa
Didier, Anne
author_sort Mandairon, Nathalie
collection PubMed
description In humans, the pleasantness of odors is a major contributor to social relationships and food intake. Smells evoke attraction and repulsion responses, reflecting the hedonic value of the odorant. While olfactory preferences are known to be strongly modulated by experience and learning, it has been recently suggested that, in humans, the pleasantness of odors may be partly explained by the physicochemical properties of the odorant molecules themselves. If odor hedonic value is indeed predetermined by odorant structure, then it could be hypothesized that other species will show similar odor preferences to humans. Combining behavioral and psychophysical approaches, we here show that odorants rated as pleasant by humans were also those which, behaviorally, mice investigated longer and human subjects sniffed longer, thereby revealing for the first time a component of olfactory hedonic perception conserved across species. Consistent with this, we further show that odor pleasantness rating in humans and investigation time in mice were both correlated with the physicochemical properties of the molecules, suggesting that olfactory preferences are indeed partly engraved in the physicochemical structure of the odorant. That odor preferences are shared between mammal species and are guided by physicochemical features of odorant stimuli strengthens the view that odor preference is partially predetermined. These findings open up new perspectives for the study of the neural mechanisms of hedonic perception.
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spelling pubmed-26151322009-01-16 Humans and Mice Express Similar Olfactory Preferences Mandairon, Nathalie Poncelet, Johan Bensafi, Moustafa Didier, Anne PLoS One Research Article In humans, the pleasantness of odors is a major contributor to social relationships and food intake. Smells evoke attraction and repulsion responses, reflecting the hedonic value of the odorant. While olfactory preferences are known to be strongly modulated by experience and learning, it has been recently suggested that, in humans, the pleasantness of odors may be partly explained by the physicochemical properties of the odorant molecules themselves. If odor hedonic value is indeed predetermined by odorant structure, then it could be hypothesized that other species will show similar odor preferences to humans. Combining behavioral and psychophysical approaches, we here show that odorants rated as pleasant by humans were also those which, behaviorally, mice investigated longer and human subjects sniffed longer, thereby revealing for the first time a component of olfactory hedonic perception conserved across species. Consistent with this, we further show that odor pleasantness rating in humans and investigation time in mice were both correlated with the physicochemical properties of the molecules, suggesting that olfactory preferences are indeed partly engraved in the physicochemical structure of the odorant. That odor preferences are shared between mammal species and are guided by physicochemical features of odorant stimuli strengthens the view that odor preference is partially predetermined. These findings open up new perspectives for the study of the neural mechanisms of hedonic perception. Public Library of Science 2009-01-16 /pmc/articles/PMC2615132/ /pubmed/19148286 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004209 Text en Mandairon et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Mandairon, Nathalie
Poncelet, Johan
Bensafi, Moustafa
Didier, Anne
Humans and Mice Express Similar Olfactory Preferences
title Humans and Mice Express Similar Olfactory Preferences
title_full Humans and Mice Express Similar Olfactory Preferences
title_fullStr Humans and Mice Express Similar Olfactory Preferences
title_full_unstemmed Humans and Mice Express Similar Olfactory Preferences
title_short Humans and Mice Express Similar Olfactory Preferences
title_sort humans and mice express similar olfactory preferences
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2615132/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19148286
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004209
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