Uchida Naoshige, Mainen Zachary F
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2003 Nov;6(11):1224-9. doi: 10.1038/nn1142. Epub 2003 Oct 19.
The sense of smell is typically thought of as a 'slow' sense, but the true temporal constraints on the accuracy of olfactory perception are not known. It has been proposed that animals make finer odor discriminations at the expense of additional processing time. To test this idea, we measured the relationship between the speed and accuracy of olfactory discrimination in rats. We found that speed of discrimination was independent of odor similarity, as measured by overlap of glomerular activity patterns. Even when pushed to psychophysical limits using mixtures of two odors, rats needed to take only one sniff (<200 ms at theta frequency) to make a decision of maximum accuracy. These results show that, for the purpose of odor quality discrimination, a fully refined olfactory sensory representation can emerge within a single sensorimotor or theta cycle, suggesting that each sniff can be considered a snapshot of the olfactory world.
嗅觉通常被认为是一种“缓慢”的感觉，但嗅觉感知准确性的真正时间限制尚不清楚。有人提出，动物以额外的处理时间为代价进行更精细的气味辨别。为了验证这一观点，我们测量了大鼠嗅觉辨别速度与准确性之间的关系。我们发现，辨别速度与气味相似性无关，气味相似性通过肾小球活动模式的重叠来衡量。即使使用两种气味的混合物将大鼠推到心理物理学极限，它们也只需要一次嗅闻（θ频率下<200毫秒）就能做出最大准确性的决定。这些结果表明，为了进行气味质量辨别，在单个感觉运动或θ周期内可以出现完全精细的嗅觉感觉表征，这表明每次嗅闻都可以被视为嗅觉世界的一个快照。
