Olfactory perception in Mice: identity, intensity, and natural correlates
Olfactory perception raises two fundamental questions: ‘What is an odor?’ — its identity—and ‘How strong is an odor?’ — its intensity. While significant progress has been made in characterizing these perceptual variables in humans in relation to odor composition and concentration, limitations in human neuroscience methods restrict our ability to probe their neural correlates with high temporal and spatial resolution. To address this gap, we developed a novel behavioral paradigm in mice to study the neural computations underlying odor perception. First, we trained mice to report perceptual distances between odors, enabling us to construct a mouse odor perceptual space that links perceptual odor identity to neural representations. Second, we trained mice to match the perceived intensities of different odors, creating a framework to probe the neural coding of odor intensity. This approach offers a path to connecting perceptual judgments to neural activity and may be extensible to other sensory systems.