A rodent's survival depends upon its ability to perceive odor cues necessary to guide mate selection, sexual behavior, foraging, territorial formation, and predator avoidance. Arguably, the need to discriminate odor cues in a complex olfactory environment requires a highly adaptable olfactory system. Indeed, it has been proposed that context-dependent modulation of the initial sensory relay cou...

It is well established that both the emotional tone of sensory stimuli and the personality characteristics of an individual can bias sensory perception. What has largely been unexplored is whether the current emotional state of an individual has a similar effect, and how it works together with other factors. Here we carry out a comprehensive study to examine how olfactory perception is affected...

Odor perception depends on a constellation of molecular, cellular, and network interactions in olfactory brain areas. Recently, there has been better understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the odor responses of neurons in the olfactory epithelium, the first-order olfactory area. In higher order sensory areas, synchronized activity in networks of neurons is known to be...

While the effects of early visual deprivation on auditory and tactile functions have been widely studied, little is known about olfactory function in early blind subjects. The present study investigated the potential effect of early blindness on the electrophysiological correlates of passive odour perception. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in eight early blind humans and eight si...

Thalamus is a key crossroad structure involved in various functions relative to visual, auditory, gustatory, and somatosensory senses. Because of the specific organization of the olfactory pathway (i.e., no direct thalamic relay between sensory neurons and primary cortex), relatively little attention has been directed toward the thalamus in olfaction. However, an olfactory thalamus exists: the ...

The judgment of pleasantness/unpleasantness is the prominent reaction to the olfactory world. In human adults, the hedonic valence of odor perception is affected by various factors, among which is an individual's lexical knowledge about smells. The present study examined whether such top-down effects of lexical knowledge on hedonic judgment of olfactory input are similar in children (5-6 years)...

Spontaneous interaction among humans and things in pervasive computing systems is often based on the spatial outreach to which an entity can interact with another entity, often referred to as ”zone of interaction”. Usually technological sensors for proximity and distance, like radio, ultrasound or microwave, are used to perceive and track the presence, activity and utterance of entities in the ...

The behavior of the olfactory bulb is modeled as a network of interconnected cells with nonlinear dynamics. External inputs from sensory neurons are introduced as perturbations to subsets of cells within the network. We describe the attractors of the system and show how they can be classified and ordered according to their varying degrees of symmetry. By studying networks of attractors in the s...

Sensory system function has evolved to meet the biological needs of organisms, but it is less often regarded that sensory system form has by necessity evolved to contend with the stimulus. For an olfactory system extracting meaningful information from natural scents, the ecological milieu presents unique problems. Recent studies provide new insights into the perceptual and neural mechanisms und...

Barth syndrome is a rare X-linked disease affecting less than 200 individuals worldwide. Several comorbidities have been associated with the pathology and, among those, cardiac myopathy and neutropenia are the most life threatening. The appropriate nutritive support is important to sustain the everyday life of Barth syndrome patients given the chronic fatigue they experience. Since they often p...