Grid-like Neural Representations Support Olfactory Navigation of a Two-Dimensional Odor Space.

ABSTRACT: Searching for food, friends, and mates often begins with an airborne scent. Importantly, odor concentration rises with physical proximity to an odorous source, suggesting a framework for orienting within olfactory landscapes to optimize behavior. Here, we created a two-dimensional odor space composed purely of odor stimuli to model how a navigator encounters smells in a natural environment. We show that human subjects can learn to navigate in olfactory space and form predictions of to-be-encountered smells. During navigation, fMRI responses in entorhinal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex take the form of grid-like representations with hexagonal periodicity and entorhinal grid strength scaled with behavioral performance across subjects. The identification of olfactory grid-like code

SUBMITTER: Bao X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7497729 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature