Effects of stochastic coding on olfactory discrimination in flies and mice.

ABSTRACT: Sparse coding can improve discrimination of sensory stimuli by reducing overlap between their representations. Two factors, however, can offset sparse coding's benefits: similar sensory stimuli have significant overlap and responses vary across trials. To elucidate the effects of these 2 factors, we analyzed odor responses in the fly and mouse olfactory regions implicated in learning and discrimination-the mushroom body (MB) and the piriform cortex (PCx). We found that neuronal responses fall along a continuum from extremely reliable across trials to extremely variable or stochastic. Computationally, we show that the observed variability arises from noise within central circuits rather than sensory noise. We propose this coding scheme to be advantageous for coarse- and fine-odor discrimina

SUBMITTER: Srinivasan S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10618007 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature