Seminar

Olfactory information processing: temporal sequences, geometry and relevance Sensory stimuli evoke complex spatiotemporal patterns of neuronal activity. Are all features of this activity relevant for behavior? What role do ‘irrelevant’ features play? We addressed these questions in the mammalian olfactory system, where neural activity in the olfactory bulb encodes odor stimuli and transmits odor-related information to higher brain areas. Utilizing pattern optogenetics for control over evoked neural activity, we created synthetic odor stimuli to explore the relevance of various neural features for stimulus readout. We found that earlier neural activity contains more behaviorally relevant information than later activity. Both spatial (identifying which neurons) and temporal (timing of neuron firing) features prove crucial in shaping the percept of a sensory object. We draw connections between our findings and natural odor processing, proposing that the structure of information relevance