Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 14, 2026

Recording Temperature-induced Neuronal Activity through Monitoring Calcium Changes in the Olfactory Bulb of Xenopus laevis
Published on: June 3, 2016
Sensory memory for odors is encoded in spontaneous correlated activity between olfactory glomeruli
Roberto F Galán1, Marcel Weidert, Randolf Menzel
1Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 10115 Berlin, Germany. galan@cnbc.cmu.edu
Abstract:
Sensory memory is a short-lived persistence of a sensory stimulus in the nervous system, such as iconic memory in the visual system. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying olfactory sensory memory. We have therefore analyzed the effect of odor stimuli on the first odor-processing network in the honeybee brain, the antennal lobe, which corresponds to the vertebrate olfactory bulb. We stained output neurons with a calcium-sensitive dye and measured across-glomerular patterns of spontaneous activity before and after a stimulus. Such a single-odor presentation changed the relative timing of spontaneous activity across glomeruli in accordance with Hebb's theory of learning. Moreover, during the first few minutes after odor presentation, correlations between the spontaneous activity fluctuations suffice to reconstruct the stimulus. As spontaneous activity is ubiquitous in the brain, modifiable fluctuations could provide an ideal substrate for Hebbian reverberations and sensory memory in other neural systems.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Olfaction
The olfactory receptors are embedded in the cilia of the...
Physiology of Smell and Olfactory Pathway
The olfactory...
Olfactory Receptors: Location and Structure
Sensory Memory
G-Protein Gated Ion Channels
Sensory organs,...
Sensory Perception: Organization of the Somatosensory System
The receptor level:
The receptor level is the first stage of sensation. It involves the detection of a stimulus by specialized sensory receptors. The stimulus must arrive within the receptor's receptive field. Next, the receptor converts the energy of the stimulus...

