Recent theoretical models of hippocampal function suggest that the hippocampus plays a critical role in the memory for the overlapping sequences of events that comprise episodic memory. Consistent with this idea, the firing of hippocampal "place cells" have been shown to represent not only location, but also the context or episode in which the location occurs. Thus, hippocampal neurons fire dif...

Deciding where to reproduce is a major challenge for most animals. Many select habitats based upon cues of successful reproduction by conspecifics, such as the presence of offspring from past reproductive events. For example, some fishes select spawning habitat following odors released by juveniles whose rearing habitat overlaps with spawning habitat. However, juveniles may emigrate before adul...

Laboratory studies have shown a significant influence of certain fragrances on affective as well as cognitive states in humans. The aim of the current study was to measure the relationship between complex, natural odors and affective states, that is, calmness, alertness, and mood, in the field. In 4 experiments, the emotional impact, intensity, and hedonics of complex, natural plant odors were ...

Why we like or dislike certain products may be better captured by physiological and behavioral measures of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) than by conscious or classical sensory tests. Responses to pleasant and unpleasant food odors presented in varying concentrations were assessed continuously using facial expressions and responses of the ANS. Results of 26 young and healthy female particip...

Recognition of individual body odors is analogous to human face recognition in that it provides information about identity. Individual body odors determined by differences at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC or H-2) have been shown to influence mate choice, pregnancy block, and maternal behavior in mice. Unfortunately, the mechanism and extent of the main olfactory bulb (MOB) and acces...

The brain's link between perception and action involves several steps, which include stimulus transduction, neuronal coding of the stimulus, comparison to a memory template and choice of an appropriate behavioral response. All of these need time, and many studies report that the time needed to compare two stimuli correlates inversely with the perceived distance between them. We developed a beha...

It has long been known that the behavior of an animal can be affected by odors from another species. Such interspecific effects of odorous compounds (allelochemics) are usually characterized according to who benefits (emitter, receiver, or both) and the odors categorized accordingly (allomones, kairomones, and synomones, respectively), which has its origin in the definition of pheromones, i.e.,...

Prior visual experience may affect olfactory identification of some odors, yet it remains unclear, whose qualities odor salience and familiarity in blindness. It seems very interesting, because such odors could be used to support the visually impaired individuals through novel solutions involving orientation navigation. Here, we analyzed performance 44 early blind 52 sighted people focusing on ...

Sensory stimuli are represented in the brain by the activity of populations of neurons. In most biological systems, studying population coding is challenging since only a tiny proportion of cells can be recorded simultaneously. Here we used two-photon imaging to record neural activity in the relatively simple Drosophila mushroom body (MB), an area involved in olfactory learning and memory. Usin...

Quantifying similarities and differences between neural response patterns is an important step in understanding neural coding in sensory systems. It is difficult, however, to compare the degree of similarity among transient oscillatory responses. We developed a novel method of wavelet correlation analysis for quantifying similarity between transient oscillatory responses, and tested the method ...