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The contribution of temporal coding to odor coding and odor perception in humans
Whether neurons encode information through their spike rates, their activity times or both is an ongoing debate in systems neuroscience. Here, we tested whether humans can discriminate between a pair of temporal odor mixtures (TOMs) composed of the same two components delivered in rapid succession i...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7007219/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32031520 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.49734 |
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author | Perl, Ofer Nahum, Nahum Belelovsky, Katya Haddad, Rafi |
author_facet | Perl, Ofer Nahum, Nahum Belelovsky, Katya Haddad, Rafi |
author_sort | Perl, Ofer |
collection | PubMed |
description | Whether neurons encode information through their spike rates, their activity times or both is an ongoing debate in systems neuroscience. Here, we tested whether humans can discriminate between a pair of temporal odor mixtures (TOMs) composed of the same two components delivered in rapid succession in either one temporal order or its reverse. These TOMs presumably activate the same olfactory neurons but at different times and thus differ mainly in the time of neuron activation. We found that most participants could hardly discriminate between TOMs, although they easily discriminated between a TOM and one of its components. By contrast, participants succeeded in discriminating between the TOMs when they were notified of their successive nature in advance. We thus suggest that the time of glomerulus activation can be exploited to extract odor-related information, although it does not change the odor perception substantially, as should be expected from an odor code per se. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7007219 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-70072192020-02-10 The contribution of temporal coding to odor coding and odor perception in humans Perl, Ofer Nahum, Nahum Belelovsky, Katya Haddad, Rafi eLife Neuroscience Whether neurons encode information through their spike rates, their activity times or both is an ongoing debate in systems neuroscience. Here, we tested whether humans can discriminate between a pair of temporal odor mixtures (TOMs) composed of the same two components delivered in rapid succession in either one temporal order or its reverse. These TOMs presumably activate the same olfactory neurons but at different times and thus differ mainly in the time of neuron activation. We found that most participants could hardly discriminate between TOMs, although they easily discriminated between a TOM and one of its components. By contrast, participants succeeded in discriminating between the TOMs when they were notified of their successive nature in advance. We thus suggest that the time of glomerulus activation can be exploited to extract odor-related information, although it does not change the odor perception substantially, as should be expected from an odor code per se. eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2020-02-07 /pmc/articles/PMC7007219/ /pubmed/32031520 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.49734 Text en © 2020, Perl et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Neuroscience Perl, Ofer Nahum, Nahum Belelovsky, Katya Haddad, Rafi The contribution of temporal coding to odor coding and odor perception in humans |
title | The contribution of temporal coding to odor coding and odor perception in humans |
title_full | The contribution of temporal coding to odor coding and odor perception in humans |
title_fullStr | The contribution of temporal coding to odor coding and odor perception in humans |
title_full_unstemmed | The contribution of temporal coding to odor coding and odor perception in humans |
title_short | The contribution of temporal coding to odor coding and odor perception in humans |
title_sort | contribution of temporal coding to odor coding and odor perception in humans |
topic | Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7007219/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32031520 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.49734 |
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