Using your nose to find your way: Ethological comparisons between human and non-human species

Raithel, Clara U.; Gottfried, Jay A.

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.06.040

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 148 publications

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“…Studies of the neural basis of spatial olfaction in murines and humans are emerging to support the thesis of the olfactory spatial hypothesis [19,56,60,61]. For example, in a recent summary of the field, Marin et al [19] proposed that the concept of odour spatial neighbourhoods could explain recent results of a grid-like pattern in human piriform cortex [62].…”

Section: (B) the Olfactory Spatial Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

How the evolution of air breathing shaped hippocampal function

Jacobs

2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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To make maps from airborne odours requires dynamic respiratory patterns. I propose that this constraint explains the modulation of memory by nasal respiration in mammals, including murine rodents (e.g. laboratory mouse, laboratory rat) and humans. My prior theories of limbic system evolution offer a framework to understand why this occurs. The answer begins with the evolution of nasal respiration in Devonian lobe-finned fishes. This evolutionary innovation led to adaptive radiations in chemosensory systems, including the emergence of the vomeronasal system and a specialization of the main olfactory system for spatial orientation. As mammals continued to radiate into environments hostile to spatial olfaction (air, water), there was a loss of hippocampal structure and function in lineages that evolved sensory modalities adapted to these new environments. Hence the independent evolution of echolocation in bats and toothed whales was accompanied by a loss of hippocampal structure (whales) and an absence of hippocampal theta oscillations during navigation (bats). In conclusion, models of hippocampal function that are divorced from considerations of ecology and evolution fall short of explaining hippocampal diversity across mammals and even hippocampal function in humans. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory’.

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Section: (B) the Olfactory Spatial Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

How the evolution of air breathing shaped hippocampal function

Jacobs

2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…But also studies on mammals show that they use the olfactory system to detect and differentiate a high number of passing chemicals (Shepherd, 1988) or sense pheromones, which they use for social interactions or mating behavior (Shepherd, 1988) as well as for navigation. In the latter case, mammals and nonmammalian species, exhibit a diverse range of behaviors to support olfactory navigation, including the use of chemotactic and anemotactic strategies, employing beaconing, route following, and the development of cognitive maps (Raithel & Gottfried, 2021; for an overview, see Vickers, 2000). For example, evidence spanning over 70 years, starting with Tolman's (1948) seminal work on rats, indicate that mammalian species can engage with the environment by integrating multisensory information into cognitive maps.…”

Section: Evolutionary Basismentioning

confidence: 99%

The human sense of smell in spatial orientation: A state-of-the-art review.

Schwarz,

Yang,

Hamburger

2024

Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice

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“…Rodents depend on odor learning for many important behaviors [ 1 , 2 ]. The piriform cortex, a key olfactory cortical region, clearly reports single odors with passive exposure, with about 10% to 20% of piriform neurons encoding a single odor [ 3 – 6 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experience-dependent evolution of odor mixture representations in piriform cortex

et al. 2023

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Rodents can learn from exposure to rewarding odors to make better and quicker decisions. The piriform cortex is thought to be important for learning complex odor associations; however, it is not understood exactly how it learns to remember discriminations between many, sometimes overlapping, odor mixtures. We investigated how odor mixtures are represented in the posterior piriform cortex (pPC) of mice while they learn to discriminate a unique target odor mixture against hundreds of nontarget mixtures. We find that a significant proportion of pPC neurons discriminate between the target and all other nontarget odor mixtures. Neurons that prefer the target odor mixture tend to respond with brief increases in firing rate at odor onset compared to other neurons, which exhibit sustained and/or decreased firing. We allowed mice to continue training after they had reached high levels of performance and find that pPC neurons become more selective for target odor mixtures as well as for randomly chosen repeated nontarget odor mixtures that mice did not have to discriminate from other nontargets. These single unit changes during overtraining are accompanied by better categorization decoding at the population level, even though behavioral metrics of mice such as reward rate and latency to respond do not change. However, when difficult ambiguous trial types are introduced, the robustness of the target selectivity is correlated with better performance on the difficult trials. Taken together, these data reveal pPC as a dynamic and robust system that can optimize for both current and possible future task demands at once.

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Using your nose to find your way: Ethological comparisons between human and non-human species

Cited by 11 publications

References 148 publications

How the evolution of air breathing shaped hippocampal function

How the evolution of air breathing shaped hippocampal function

The human sense of smell in spatial orientation: A state-of-the-art review.

Experience-dependent evolution of odor mixture representations in piriform cortex

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