Youngentob Steven L, Johnson Brett A, Leon Michael, Sheehe Paul R, Kent Paul F
Department of Neuroscience and Physiology, State University of New York, Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY 13210, USA.
Behav Neurosci. 2006 Dec;120(6):1337-45. doi: 10.1037/0735-7044.120.6.1337.
Odorants and their perceptions differ along multiple dimensions, requiring that a critical examination of any putative neural code directly assess the multidimensional nature of the encoding process. Previous work has examined simple, systematic odorant differences that, regardless of coding strategy, would be expected to produce simple, systematic predictions in neural and behavioral responses. In the present study, an odorant identification confusion matrix task that extracts precise quality relationships across odorants was used to determine whether spatially specific glomerular activity patterns predict perceptual quality relationships for odorants that cannot easily be classified a priori along a single chemical dimension. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis of odorant pattern similarity measures derived from the comparison of [14C]-2-deoxyglucose glomerular activity pattern data yielded a two-dimensional odorant activity space that was highly significantly predictive of similarly obtained odorant perceptual spaces, uniformly across animals. These results strongly support the relevance of global spatial patterns in the olfactory bulb to the encoding of odor quality.
气味剂及其感知在多个维度上存在差异，这就要求对任何假定的神经编码进行严格审查时，要直接评估编码过程的多维性质。先前的研究考察了简单、系统的气味剂差异，无论编码策略如何，预计这些差异都会在神经和行为反应中产生简单、系统的预测。在本研究中，使用了一种气味剂识别混淆矩阵任务，该任务可提取不同气味剂之间精确的质量关系，以确定空间特异性的肾小球活动模式是否能预测那些难以根据单一化学维度进行先验分类的气味剂的感知质量关系。对通过比较[14C]-2-脱氧葡萄糖肾小球活动模式数据得出的气味剂模式相似性度量进行多维尺度分析（MDS），得到了一个二维气味剂活动空间，该空间在所有动物中都高度显著地预测了通过类似方式获得的气味剂感知空间。这些结果有力地支持了嗅球中全局空间模式与气味质量编码的相关性。
