Sensory input across modalities is highly dynamic, continuously confronting the brain with thentask of making sense of the external world. Olfaction is a key sense that many species depend on for survival, for example to locate food sources and mating partners or to avoid encountering predators. In the absence of visual cues, olfactory cues are especially useful, as they provide information over a large range of distances. Natural odours form temporally complex plumes that show rapid fluctuations in odour concentration carrying information about the location of an odour source. I will demonstrate that the mammalian olfactory system has access to unexpectedly fast temporal features in odour stimuli, at timescales of 25 ms. This in turn endows animals with the capacity to overcome key behavioural challenges such as odour source separation, figure-ground segregation and odour localisation, by extracting spatial information from temporal odour dynamics.
In my future research, I aim to investigate how temporally complex odour information is represented across key structures of the mammalian olfactory system using in vivo physiology. This will provide important groundwork to elucidate the cellular and circuit mechanisms underlying the encoding of dynamic odours. In addition, I aim to study which features of temporally complex odours are used for navigation behaviour by simultaneously recording and correlating the animal’s respiration sampling strategy, the dynamic odour profile encountered by the animal and neural activity from early and higher order olfactory areas in freely moving
mice. Together, my research will allow to directly assess how mammals use olfaction to extract information about space from time and thereby provide insights into how naturalistic sensory information is processed and how it guides behaviour.