Presentation Details
| Piriform cortex takes sides: temporally-segregated odor representations from ipsilateral and contralateral nostrils within a sniff � G.Naz Dikecligil1, Andrew I.Yang2, Kathryn A.Davis1, Jay A.Gottfried1. 1University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.2Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, AZ, USA |
Abstract
The human nose, often thought of as a singular sensory organ, contains two distinct sensory channels arising from the left and right olfactory epithelia. Although there has been extensive work on how the olfactory system responds to odorants, relatively little is known on how the olfactory system ultimately integrates odor information arising from its two segregated sensory channels. In this study, we set out to investigate whether the human piriform cortex (PC) maintains distinct and separable representations of odor information arising from each nostril. We recorded intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) signals from PC of epilepsy patients undergoing invasive monitoring, enabling us to characterize odor responses with high spatial and temporal resolution. Subjects participated in an odor identification task, where odors were delivered either to the left, right, or bilateral nostrils via a computer-controlled olfactometer. We analyzed the time course of odor identity coding and found that, on average, odor identity information from the ipsilateral nostril is encoded ∼480-ms faster than the contralateral nostril. During bi-nostril odor sampling, odor information emerged in two temporally segregated epochs, with the first epoch corresponding to the ipsilateral and the second epoch corresponding to the contralateral odor representations. These findings reveal that PC maintains distinct representations of odor input from each nostril through temporal segregation, highlighting an olfactory coding scheme at the cortical level that can parse odor information across nostrils within the course of a single inhalation.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author.