Schaefer Andreas T, Margrie Troy W
Department of Physiology, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
Trends Neurosci. 2007 Mar;30(3):92-100. doi: 10.1016/j.tins.2007.01.001. Epub 2007 Jan 16.
A complete understanding of the mechanisms underlying any kind of sensory, motor or cognitive task requires analysis from the systems to the cellular level. In olfaction, new behavioural evidence in rodents has provided temporal limits on neural processing times that correspond to less than 150ms--the timescale of a single sniff. Recent in vivo data from the olfactory bulb indicate that, within each sniff, odour representation is not only spatially organized, but also temporally structured by odour-specific patterns of onset latencies. Thus, we propose that the spatial representation of odour is not a static one, but rather evolves across a sniff, whereby for difficult discriminations of similar odours, it is necessary for the olfactory system to "wait" for later-activated components. Based on such evidence, we have devised a working model to assess further the relevance of such spatiotemporal processes in odour representation.
要全面理解任何一种感觉、运动或认知任务背后的机制，需要从系统层面到细胞层面进行分析。在嗅觉方面，啮齿动物的新行为证据给出了神经处理时间的时间限制，该时间不到150毫秒——即单次嗅闻的时间尺度。最近来自嗅球的体内数据表明，在每次嗅闻过程中，气味表征不仅在空间上有组织，而且在时间上由气味特异性的起始潜伏期模式构建。因此，我们提出气味的空间表征不是静态的，而是在一次嗅闻过程中演变的，由此对于相似气味的困难辨别，嗅觉系统有必要“等待”稍后激活的成分。基于这些证据，我们设计了一个工作模型，以进一步评估这种时空过程在气味表征中的相关性。
