Psychophysical properties of odour processing can be quantitatively described by relative AP latency patterns in mitral and tufted cells
Electrophysiological and population imaging data in rodents show that olfactory bulb(OB) activity is profoundly modulated by the odour sampling process while behavioralexperiments indicate that odour discrimination can occur within a single sniff. Thispaper addresses the question of whether action p...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2012-05-01
|
| Series: | Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnsys.2012.00030/full |
| Summary: | Electrophysiological and population imaging data in rodents show that olfactory bulb(OB) activity is profoundly modulated by the odour sampling process while behavioralexperiments indicate that odour discrimination can occur within a single sniff. Thispaper addresses the question of whether action potential (AP) latencies occurring acrossthe mitral and tufted cell (M/TC) population within an individual sampling cycle couldaccount for the psychophysical properties of odour processing. To determine this wecreated an OB model (50 000 M/TCs) exhibiting hallmarks of published in vivoproperties and used a template-matching algorithm to assess stimulus separation. Suchan AP latency-based scheme showed high reproducibility and sensitivity such that odourstimuli could be reliably separated independent of concentration. As in behavioralexperiments we found that very dissimilar odours (A vs B) were accurately andrapidly discerned while very similar odours (binary mixtures, 0.4A/0.6B vs 0.6A/0.4B)required up to 90 ms longer. As in lesion studies we find that AP latency-basedrepresentation is rather insensitive to disruption of large regions of the OB. The APlatency-based scheme described here therefore captures both temporal andpsychophysical properties of olfactory processing and suggests that the onset patterns ofM/TC activity in the OB represent stimulus specific features of olfactory stimuli. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1662-5137 |