. Color has a profound effect on the perception of odors. For example, strawberry-flavored drinks smell more pleasant when colored red than green and descriptions of the "nose" of a wine are dramatically influenced by its color. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate a neurophysiological correlate of these cross-modal visual influences on olfactory perception. Subjects were scanned while exposed either to odors or colors in isolation or to color-odor combinations that were rated on the basis of how well they were perceived to match. Activity in caudal regions of the orbitofrontal cortex and in the insular cortex increased progressively with the perceived congruency of the odorcolor pairs. These findings demonstrate the neuronal correlates of olfactory response modulation by color cues in brain areas previously identified as encoding the hedonic value of smells.

Sensitivity encoding (SENSE) with iterative image reconstruction was used to shorten the readout duration in single-shot spiral imaging by a factor of 2. This enabled susceptibilityrelated blurring and signal loss artifacts to be reduced and spatial resolution to be improved. As a beneficial side effect, the gradient duty cycle was also reduced. The spiral SENSE technique was applied to functional MRI (fMRI) with blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) contrast and compared to a conventional spiral acquisition. Stimulation experiments were performed in seven volunteers using motor, visual, and taste paradigms. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and signal-to-fluctuation-noise ratio (SFNR) of the SENSE acquisitions were reduced by 20% and 13%, respectively, with respect to the longer readout. The overall activation detected was comparable to that of the conventional spiral acquisition, even though difficulties in reproducing the stimulation response hampered the evaluation. In some cases, the application of SENSE enabled recovery of acti- Key words: single-shot spiral imaging; sensitivity encoding; SENSE; susceptibility artifacts; BOLD fMRI Spiral readout techniques (1) are frequently used in functional MRI (fMRI) of the brain based on blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) contrast (2) because of their superior motion and flow properties as compared with Cartesian trajectories (3,4). Usually, complete images are acquired in a single shot after spin excitation to provide high time efficiency and to avoid sensitivity to intershot motion. However, depending on the required spatial resolution and the available gradient system, this leads to relatively long acquisition windows (in the range of 20 -100 ms). During this period of time, off-resonance phase errors evolve due to susceptibility gradients or chemical shift differences, causing a degradation of the point-spread function (PSF) (5). Additional blurring results from signal loss caused by transverse (T * 2 ) relaxation during the readout period (6).The conjugate phase reconstruction (CPR) method (7,8) partly enables correction of off-resonance errors, even in the case of non-Cartesian trajectories. However, CPR assumes a certain smoothness of the spatial off-resonance distribution and fails in cases where strong susceptibility gradients are present. Furthermore, it cannot account for signal loss due to through-plane dephasing or T * 2 decay. One way to address both types of dephasing is to shorten the acquisition window using multiple spiral interleaves. However, motion sensitivity has to be dealt with by using some kind of navigation (9), and more excitations are needed to complete an image, leading to reduced temporal resolution.As a means of improving time efficiency in MRI, parallel acquisition techniques using receiver coil arrays can shorten readout trains in Cartesian single-shot imaging, thereby reducing artifacts (10 -12) and improving spatial resolution (13). For sensitivity encoding (SENSE) (14), an efficient algorithm for iterative reconstruction of data from ...

We report an experiment designed to investigate whether olfactory cues can influence people's judgments of facial attractiveness. Sixteen female participants judged the attractiveness of a series of male faces presented briefly on a computer monitor using a 9-point visual rating scale. While viewing each face, the participants were simultaneously presented with either clean air or else with 1 of 4 odorants (the odor was varied on a trial-by-trial basis) from a custom-built olfactometer. We included 2 pleasant odors (geranium and a male fragrance) and 2 unpleasant odors (rubber and body odor) as confirmed by pilot testing. The results showed that the participants rated the male faces as being significantly less attractive in the presence of an unpleasant odor than when the faces were presented together with a pleasant odor or with clean air (these conditions did not differ significantly). These results demonstrate the cross-modal influence that unpleasant odors can have on people's judgments of facial attractiveness. Interestingly, this pattern of results was unaffected by whether the odors were body relevant (the body odor and the male fragrance) or not (the rubber and geranium odors).