Animals can be innately attracted to certain odorants. Because these attractants are particularly salient, they might be expected to induce relatively strong responses throughout the olfactory pathway, helping animals detect the most relevant odors but limiting flexibility to respond to other odors. Alternatively, specific neural wiring might link innately preferred odors to appropriate behavio...

Sniffing is one-way animals collect chemical signals, and many males self-groom when they encounter the odor of opposite-sex conspecifics. We tested the hypothesis that sexual chemical signals from females can induce self-grooming behavior in male root voles (Microtus oeconomus Pallas). Specifically, we investigated the sniffing pattern of male root voles in response to odors from the head, tru...

After reading the title of this chapter you might conclude that this is an odd area of investigation, maybe even trivial to human behavior. The sense of smell is given a great deal of importance in non-human animal interactions, including parent-offspring relationships and mating. Often when we think of odors we think of something unpleasant or something to be avoided. However, the sense of sme...

Vertebrate olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) transduce odor stimuli into electrical signals by means of an adenylyl cyclase/cAMP second messenger cascade, but it remains widely debated whether this cAMP cascade mediates transduction for all odorants or only certain odor classes. To address this problem, we have analyzed the generator currents induced by odors that failed to produce cAMP in prev...

Aiming to unravel how animals perceive odors, a variety of neurophysiological techniques are used today. For olfactory stimulation, odors are commonly incorporated into a constant airstream that carries odor molecules to the receptor organ (air-delivered stimulation). Such odor delivery works well for odors of high volatility (naturally effective over long distances) but less or not at all for ...

Queenless groups of honey bee workers (Apis mellifera L.) respond with typical increases in their metabolic activity when exposed to queens. Volatile queen odors release 46.8% of the reaction in worker groups compared to combinations of volatile odors and non-volatile factors. Worker groups which were allowed to learn the odor of a given queen were able to discriminate between volatile odors of...

Does hedonic appreciation evolve differently for pleasant odors and unpleasant odors during normal aging? To answer this question we combined psychophysics and electro-encephalographic recordings in young and old adults. A first study showed that pleasant odorants (but not unpleasant ones) were rated as less pleasant by old adults. A second study validated this decrease in hedonic appreciation ...

Hedonic ratings of odors and olfactory preferences are influenced by a number of modulating factors, such as prior experience and knowledge about an odor's identity. The present study addresses the relationship between knowledge about an odor's identity due to prior experience, assessed by means of a test of cued odor identification, and odor pleasantness ratings in children who exhibit ongoing...

background: looking in literature reveals that aging is accompanied by olfactory dysfunction and hyposmia/anosmia is a common manifestation in some neurodegenerative disorders. olfactory dysfunction is regarded as non-motor manifestations of parkinson disease (pd). the main goal of this study was to examine the extent of olfactory dysfunction in persian pd patients. methods: we used seven types...

The present study assessed emotion regulation in response to chemosensory and visual stimuli. Using cognitive reappraisal, 40 female participants regulated their emotions in response to disgusting pictures and odors, while the startle reflex was elicited and emotion ratings were assessed. Participants reported feeling less negative, and less aroused, while down-regulating their emotions towards...