Odor representations in olfactory cortex: distributed rate coding and decorrelated population activity

By Keiji Miura, Zachary F. Mainen, Naoshige Uchida. 2012

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY How information encoded in neuronal spike trains is used to guide sensory decisions is a fundamental question. In olfaction, a single sniff is sufficient for fine odor discrimination but the neural representations on which olfactory decisions are based are unclear. Here, we recorded neural ensemble activity in the anterior piriform cortex (aPC) of rats performing an odor mixture categorization task. We show that odors evoke transient bursts locked to sniff onset and that odor identity can be better decoded using burst spike counts than by spike latencies or temporal patterns. Surprisingly, aPC ensembles also exhibited near-zero noise correlations during odor stimulation. Consequently, fewer than 100 aPC neurons provided sufficient information to account for behavioral speed and accuracy, suggesting that behavioral performance limits arise downstream of aPC. These findings demonstrate profound transformations in the dynamics of odor representations from the olfactory bulb to cortex and reveal likely substrates for odor-guided decisions.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensory Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Re-evaluating circuit mechanisms underlying pattern separation (2019, positive): “Moreover, broad inhibition in the piriform cortex (Poo and Isaacson, 2009) contributes to sparsening and decorrelation that is thought to further contribute to separating overlapping odour representations (Stettler and Axel, 2009; Miura et al., 2012).”
Cortical feedback decorrelates olfactory bulb output in awake mice (2015, background): “Corticalbulbar Feedback Is Routed through Distinct Channels of Enhanced and Suppressed Boutons Previous work in the APC has described spatially distributed and sparse odor responses (Miura et al., 2012; Poo and Isaacson, 2009; Stettler and Axel, 2009; Zhan and Luo, 2010).”
Imaging a Population Code for Odor Identity in the Drosophila Mushroom Body (2013, methodology): “We investigated this using two-component odor blends (Uchida and Mainen, 2003; Abraham et al., 2004; Fernandez et al., 2009; Miura et al., 2012) to construct a psychometric function describing odor discrimination accuracy.”
Gamma-band synchronization in the neocortex: novel analysis methods and their application to sensory and motivational systems (2013, background): “Interestingly, cells in the olfactory bulb and piriform cortex are very strongly entrained by the sniffing rhythm, providing stimulus information only in bouts of spiking outputs occurring during a certain phase of the sniffing cycle (Shusterman et al., 2011; Miura et al., 2012).”