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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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

In various biological systems information from many noisy molecular receptors must be integrated into a collective response. A striking example is the thermal imaging organ of pit vipers. Single nerve fibers in the organ reliably respond to…

Selectivity of olfactory receptor neuron (ORN) is compared with that of its receptor proteins (R) with fluctuations of odor binding-releasing process taken into account. The binding-releasing process is modeled as N Bernoulli trials, where…

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…

The mammalian olfactory system learns rapidly from very few examples, presented in unpredictable online sequences, and then recognizes these learned odors under conditions of substantial interference without exhibiting catastrophic…

We consider the problem of olfactory searches in a turbulent environment. We focus on agents that respond solely to odor stimuli, with no access to spatial perception nor prior information about the odor. We ask whether navigation to a…

Lifelong development allows animals and machines to adapt to changes in the environment as well as in their own systems, such as wear and tear in sensors and actuators. An important use case of such adaptation is industrial odor-sensing.…

Associative learning allows animals to rapidly adapt to changes in the environment. Whether and what aspects of such acquired traits may be transmittable across generations remains unclear. Using prolonged olfactory training and subsequent…

Natural odor environments present turbulent and dynamic conditions, causing chemical signals to fluctuate in space, time, and intensity. While many species have evolved highly adaptive behavioral responses to such variability, the emerging…

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…

This article provides a background and descriptive analysis of insect memory and the coding of olfactory sensation in Drosophila, presenting graphs and summary statistics from a large dataset of neurons and synapses that was recently made…

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…

Navigation by scent is a capability in robotic systems that is rising in demand. However, current methods often suffer from ambiguities, particularly when robots misattribute odours to incorrect objects due to limitations in olfactory…

Mitral cells, the principal neurons in the olfactory bulb, respond to odorants by firing bursts of action potentials called sharp events. A given cell produces a sharp event at a fixed phase during the sniff cycle in response to a given…

Animals use stereo sampling of odor concentration to localize sources and follow odor trails. We analyze the dynamics of a bilateral model that depends on the simultaneous comparison between odor concentrations detected by left and right…

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…