Related papers: The Dynamics of Bilateral Olfactory Search and Nav…
Animal behavior and neural recordings show that the brain is able to measure both the intensity of an odor and the timing of odor encounters. However, whether intensity or timing of odor detections is more informative for olfactory-driven…
Locating and intercepting a moving target from possibly delayed, intermittent sensory signals is a paradigmatic problem in decision-making under uncertainty, and a fundamental challenge for, e.g., animals seeking prey or mates and…
Studies of insect olfactory processing indicate that odors are represented by rich spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity. These patterns are very difficult to predict a priori, yet they are stimulus specific and reliable upon repeated…
Olfactory navigation is observed across species and plays a crucial role in locating resources for survival. In the laboratory, understanding the behavioral strategies and neural circuits underlying odor-taxis requires a detailed…
Olfactory search in turbulent environments is a sensorimotor challenge solved with remarkable efficiency by many animals, yet replicating this ability in artificial systems remains difficult because detections are intermittent and wind…
Animals smelling in the real world use a small number of receptors to sense a vast number of natural molecular mixtures, and proceed to learn arbitrary associations between odors and valences. Here, we propose a new interpretation of how…
We present a model of a coupled system of the olfactory bulb and cortex. Odor inputs to the epithelium are transformed to oscillatory bulbar activities. The cortex recognizes the odor by resonating to the bulbar oscillating pattern when the…
Living systems continually respond to signals from the surrounding environment. Survival requires that their responses adapt quickly and robustly to the changes in the environment. One particularly challenging example is olfactory…
The olfactory sense measures the chemical composition of the environment using a diverse array of olfactory receptors. In vertebrates, the olfactory receptors reside in a mucus layer in the nasal cavity and can thus only detect odorants…
The olfactory system removes correlations in natural odors using a network of inhibitory neurons in the olfactory bulb. It has been proposed that this network integrates the response from all olfactory receptors and inhibits them equally.…
Recordings from neurons in the insects' olfactory primary processing center, the antennal lobe (AL), reveal that the AL is able to process the input from chemical receptors into distinct neural activity patterns, called olfactory neural…
The olfactory system of male moths is exquisitely sensitive to pheromones emitted by females and transported in the environment by atmospheric turbulence. Moths respond to minute amounts of pheromones and their behavior is sensitive to the…
We consider a random walker whose motion is tethered around a focal point. We use two models that exhibit the same spatial dependence in the steady state but widely different dynamics. In one case, the walker is subject to a deterministic…
Many aquatic organisms exhibit remarkable abilities to detect and track chemical signals when foraging, mating and escaping. For example, the male copepod { \em T. longicornis} identifies the female in the open ocean by following its…
Early olfactory pathway responses to the presentation of an odor exhibit remarkably similar dynamical behavior across phyla from insects to mammals, and frequently involve transitions among quiescence, collective network oscillations, and…
Olfactory receptor usage is highly heterogeneous, with some receptor types being orders of magnitude more abundant than others. We propose an explanation for this striking fact: the receptor distribution is tuned to maximally represent…
We present a model of an olfactory system that performs odor segmentation. Based on the anatomy and physiology of natural olfactory systems, it consists of a pair of coupled modules, bulb and cortex. The bulb encodes the odor inputs as…
Olfactory systems use a small number of broadly sensitive receptors to combinatorially encode a vast number of odors. We propose a method of decoding such distributed representations by exploiting a statistical fact: receptors that do not…
Natural odors typically consist of many molecules at different concentrations. It is unclear how the numerous odorant molecules and their possible mixtures are discriminated by relatively few olfactory receptors. Using an…
We present a generalized theoretical framework for olfactory representation and plasticity, using the theory of smooth manifolds and sheaves to depict categorical odor learning via distributed neural computation. Beginning with the space of…