Selective Attention Controls Olfactory Decisions and the Neural Encoding of Odors

Abstract

Critical animal behaviors, especially among rodents, are guided by odors in remarkably well-coordinated manners, yet many extramodal sensory cues compete for cognitive resources in these ecological contexts. That rodents can engage in such odor-guided behaviors suggests that they can selectively attend to odors. Indeed, higher-order cognitive processes-such as learning, memory, decision making, and action selection-rely on the proper filtering of sensory cues based on their relative salience. We developed a behavioral paradigm to reveal that rats are capable of selectively attending to odors in the presence of competing extramodal stimuli. We found that this selective attention facilitates accurate odor-guided decisions, which become further strengthened with experience. Further, we uncovered that selective attention to odors adaptively sharpens their representation among neurons in the olfactory tubercle, an olfactory cortex region of the ventral striatum that is considered integral for evaluating sensory information in the context of motivated behaviors. Odor-directed selective attention exerts influences during moments of heightened odor anticipation and enhances odorant representation by increasing stimulus contrast in a signal-to-noise-type coding scheme. Together, these results reveal that rats engage selective attention to optimize olfactory outcomes. Further, our finding of attention-dependent coding in the olfactory tubercle challenges the notion that a thalamic relay is integral for the attentional control of sensory coding.

An emergent population code in primary auditory cortex supports selective attention to spectral and temporal sound features

“…Generally, these studies have shown that, under demanding sensory conditions, A1 neuron responses and/or tuning are enhanced, consistent with findings across PSC modalities (Carlson et al, 2018;Gomez-Ramirez et al, 2016;Mineault et al, 2016).…”

Behavioral and Neurobiological Convergence of Odor, Mood and Emotion: A Review

“…As olfactory cortex, it receives direct input from the olfactory bulb, though unlike other olfactory cortical areas, it does not send a return projection to the bulb (In't Zandt et al, 2019). It is heavily interconnected with sensory, cognitive, hormonal, and reward-related regions of the brain (Xiong and Wesson, 2016) and maybe involved in attention to odors (Carlson et al, 2018) and odor-induced motivation (Murata et al, 2015), as might be expected given its strong link to dopaminergic reward and motor circuits (Ikemoto, 2007). The rodents OT is also monosynaptically connected with the amygdala and hypothalamus.…”

Complex neural representation of odour information in the olfactory bulb

“…Both spatial and temporal coding strategies face the challenge that odour perception is dynamic and varies under different brain states. Wakefulness, attention, experience, metabolism status and the value of the odour for the subject are important factors that can change the perception of the same odour . The underlying mechanisms by which the OB represents odour information precisely under different brain and behavioural states remain elusive, although recent studies have provided relevant data and some hypotheses have been established .…”