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Olfaction

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The sense of smell is achieved through the activities of the olfactory system. It starts when an airborne odorant enters the nasal cavity and reaches olfactory epithelium (OE). The OE is protected by a thin layer of mucus, which also serves the purpose of dissolving more complex compounds into simpler chemical odorants. The size of the OE and the density of sensory neurons varies among species; in humans, the OE is only about 9-10 cm2.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 17, 2026

Imaging Odor-Evoked Activities in the Mouse Olfactory Bulb using Optical Reflectance and Autofluorescence Signals

Imaging Odor-Evoked Activities in the Mouse Olfactory Bulb using Optical Reflectance and Autofluorescence Signals

Published on: October 31, 2011

Predicting odorant quality perceptions from multidimensional scaling of olfactory bulb glomerular activity patterns.

Steven L Youngentob¹, Brett A Johnson, Michael Leon

¹Department of Neuroscience and Physiology, State University of New York, Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY 13210, USA. youngens@upstate.edu

Behavioral Neuroscience

|January 5, 2007

Summary

Global spatial patterns in the olfactory bulb are crucial for encoding odor quality. This study found that these patterns accurately predict how animals perceive odor relationships, even for complex scents.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Olfactory system research
Sensory coding

Background:

Odor perception is complex and multidimensional.
Previous research focused on simple odorant differences.
A need exists to understand the neural basis of complex odor quality perception.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if spatially specific glomerular activity patterns predict perceptual quality relationships for odorants.
To examine odorants that are difficult to classify along a single chemical dimension.

Main Methods:

Utilized an odorant identification confusion matrix task to define odorant quality relationships.
Employed multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis on [14C]-2-deoxyglucose glomerular activity patterns.
Compared odorant activity spaces with perceptual spaces across multiple animals.

Main Results:

A two-dimensional odorant activity space was derived from glomerular activity patterns.
This activity space was highly predictive of the odorant perceptual spaces.
The predictive relationship was consistent across all tested animals.

Conclusions:

Global spatial patterns in the olfactory bulb are highly relevant for encoding odor quality.
This supports a model where olfactory processing relies on distributed representations.
The findings advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying complex odor perception.