Evoked Brain Responses in Odor Stimuli Evaluation - an EEG Event Related Potential Study

Decoding olfactory cognition has been generating significant interest in recent years due to a wide range of applications, from diagnosing neurodegenerative disorders to consumer research and traditional medicine. In this study, we have investigated whether changes in odor stimuli evaluation across repeated stimuli presentation can be attributed to changes in brain perception of the stimuli. Epoch intervals representing olfactory sensory perception were extracted from electroencephalography (EEG) signals using minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR)-based single trial event related potential (ERP) approach to understand the evoked response to high pleasantness and low pleasantness stimuli. We found statistically significant changes in self reported stimuli evaluation between initial and final trials (p < 0.05) for both stimuli categories. However, the changes in ERP amplitude were found to be statistically significant only for the high pleasantness stimuli. This implies that olfactory stimuli of higher hedonic value recruit high-order cognitive processing that may be responsible for initial increased ERP response, as well as for rapid subsequent adaptation in processing the stimuli.