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| Poster #366 Estimating perceived odor intensity in mice |
| Jacqueline Zhao1, Beatrice Barra1, Aiden Streleckis2, Robert Pellegrino2, Joel D. Mainland2,3, Dmitry Rinberg1 1Neuroscience Institute, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, New York, NY, United States 2Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA, United States 3Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, United States |
Intensity is a key property of sensory processing that is critical for animal behaviors such as navigation and foraging, but how odor intensity information is processed by the brain to perform these behaviors is still unknown. Studies have highlighted the existence of several neural correlates of odorant concentration, however, concentration is an inaccurate descriptor of perceived intensity. Indeed, the relationship between concentration and intensity is complex and odor-dependent: the same concentration of different odorants can evoke dramatically different perceptual experiences. Hence, understanding the neural processing of perceived odor intensity hinges on the possibility of obtaining neural recordings and perceptual reports in the same model system. Here, we developed a behavioral paradigm to measure perceived odor intensity in mice. We first used this paradigm to measure which concentrations of odor pairs are perceived as iso-intense by mice. This was repeated for three odor pairs at three different concentration ranges (low, medium, and high). We then used sigmoidal functions to model the relationship between concentration and perceived intensity, and wrote equivalency equations for a subset of the iso-intense concentrations. Using these equations as constraints, we employed a differential evolution optimization algorithm to estimate the parametric relationship between the concentration and the perceived intensity of each odorant. The concentration-intensity curves successfully predicted held-out iso-intense concentrations for the three odor pairs (RMSE = 0.021±0.018 mean and s.d). Our results show a novel and reliable method to measure perceived odor intensity in mice. We will leverage these results to ask which neural activity features are critical to encoding perceived odor intensity. |