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| Poster #409 AChemS Undergrad Finalist: Revealing Explicit Odor Intensity Ratings with Relative Readouts |
| Aiden Streleckis1, Robert Pellegrino1, Beatrice Barra2, Matthew Andres1, Jacqueline Zhao2, Dmitry Rinberg2, Joel D. Mainland1,3 1Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA, United States 2Neuroscience Institute, New York University Langone Health, New York, NY, United States 3Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States |
Odor intensity is essential to odor perception, enabling an organism to decipher the proximity or location of an odor stimulus. Understanding the neural mechanisms behind the perception of odor intensity is critical to determining how the brain translates odor stimuli into perceivable sensations. Due to the chemical differences between different odorants, there is a disconnect between concentration and intensity: while one odor may be very intense at a given concentration, another may be undetectable at that same concentration. While understanding the relationship of concentration and intensity is easily assessed in humans using explicit ratings of intensity, we cannot obtain explicit ratings from model organisms. Due to this limitation, deciphering the neural mechanisms of odor intensity perception by deriving both perceptual and neural data from the same model organism presents difficulties. To measure perceived intensity in mice, we used a two-odor concentration discrimination task (2OCD) where intensity disparities across odors lead to systematic errors in the task. This allowed us to predict the concentrations at which two odors have equal perceived intensity. To validate this prediction, we replicated the mouse paradigm in humans and confirmed that the systematic errors correspond with explicit matched odor intensities. Our results confirm that explicit odor intensities are accurately predicted using the 2OCD paradigm, validating it as a measure of perceived intensity in mice. This methodology provides a powerful tool to investigate the neural encoding of perceived intensity in a mouse model. |