Perceptual Coding and Plasticity of Odour Quality Categories in the Human Brain.

Understanding how the brain creates internal perceptions of the external world has long been a key focus of neuroscientific research. Currently little is known about the neural processing of odour quality, that is, the perceptual character of a smell (e.g., minty, floral) arising from an odourous substance. The primary goal of this project is to characterize the functional architecture of odour quality coding in the human brain, and to understand the roles of learning, context, and experience in the formation and modulation of these codes. I will combine olfactory functional neuroimaging techniques with psychophysical approaches and computational models to characterize how the brain encodes neural information about odour quality. Multivariate statistical analyses will be incorporated to test the hypothesis that odour qualities and categories take the form of spatially distributed activity patterns in the human olfactory brain. These techniques will be paired with novel paradigms o f olfactory sensory deprivation, perceptual rivalry, expectation, and decision-making, to investigate whether experimentally-induced changes in ensemble brain activity coincide with changes in odour perception. Such studies may help identify a viable signature of odour quality that can be used to decode an individual s odour perception, fulfilling an essential criterion of a behaviourally relevant olfactory code.