Primacy coding facilitates effective odor discrimination when receptor sensitivities are tuned.

ABSTRACT: The olfactory system faces the difficult task of identifying an enormous variety of odors independent of their intensity. Primacy coding, where the odor identity is encoded by the receptor types that respond earliest, might provide a compact and informative representation that can be interpreted efficiently by the brain. In this paper, we analyze the information transmitted by a simple model of primacy coding using numerical simulations and statistical descriptions. We show that the encoded information depends strongly on the number of receptor types included in the primacy representation, but only weakly on the size of the receptor repertoire. The representation is independent of the odor intensity and the transmitted information is useful to perform typical olfactory tasks with close to

SUBMITTER: Zwicker D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6692051 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature