Perceptual quality and internal representation of odors mixtures is tuned by experience

AGUSTIN LARA; MARACHLIAN EMILIANO; LOCATELLI FERNANDO

Cordoba

Congreso; XXXIV Reunión Anual SAN 2019; 2019

Sociedad Argentina de investigación en Neurociencias (SAN)

Animals are able to sense their environment and generate an internal representation of it. This ability is important to, among other things, perceive and locate food sources. In this context, sensory mechanisms and behavior evoked by different stimuli are studied to understand how animals detect and integrate environmental information. A requirement in the detection and processing of this information is the ability to discriminate between stimuli that, although they are physically similar, may have different meanings, and that of generalizing between stimuli that, although physically different, may have the same meaning. In many cases this ability is innate, however, in many others it is determined by experience. Previous studies showed that appetitive experience with an odorant changes the internal representation of a mixture that contains it, where the activity pattern evoked by the mixture is more similar to the representation of the rewarded component and less to that of the novel component. It has been interpreted that those changes would favor the perception of the rewarded component, which could otherwise be occluded by the perception of the mixture as an odor distinct to its components. In the present study we evaluate if those changes do have a real impact in the way an odor mixture is perceived. We confirm that previous experience with the pure components affect the perceptual quality of the mixture in close parallel to the changes in its internal representation.