State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Nat Hum Behav. 2024 Jun;8(6):1150-1162. doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-01849-0. Epub 2024 Mar 18.
Molecules-the elementary units of substances-are commonly considered the units of processing in olfactory perception, giving rise to undifferentiated odour objects invariant to environmental variations. By selectively perturbing the processing of chemical substructures with adaptation ('the psychologist's microelectrode') in a series of psychophysical and neuroimaging experiments (458 participants), we show that two perceptually distinct odorants sharing part of their structural features become significantly less discernible following adaptation to a third odorant containing their non-shared structural features, in manners independent of olfactory intensity, valence, quality or general olfactory adaptation. The effect is accompanied by reorganizations of ensemble activity patterns in the posterior piriform cortex that parallel subjective odour quality changes, in addition to substructure-based neural adaptations in the anterior piriform cortex and amygdala. Central representations of odour quality and the perceptual outcome thus embed submolecular structural information and are malleable by recent olfactory encounters.
分子是物质的基本单位，通常被认为是嗅觉感知过程中的处理单位，产生不变的、未分化的气味对象，不受环境变化的影响。通过在一系列心理物理和神经影像学实验中（458 名参与者），选择性地用适应（“心理学家的微电极”）来干扰化学亚结构的处理，我们发现，两种在感知上明显不同的气味剂，它们的部分结构特征相同，在适应了含有非共享结构特征的第三种气味剂后，变得明显难以区分，这种方式与嗅觉强度、效价、质量或一般嗅觉适应无关。这种效应伴随着嗅球后皮质的整体活动模式的重新组织，与主观气味质量变化相平行，在前嗅球和杏仁核中也存在基于亚结构的神经适应。因此，气味质量的中枢表示和感知结果嵌入了亚分子结构信息，并且可以通过最近的嗅觉体验来改变。
