{"id":1854,"date":"2019-04-25T15:15:29","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T05:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cognav.net\/?p=1854"},"modified":"2019-04-25T15:15:29","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T05:15:29","slug":"whether-humans-can-navigate-a-sensory-space-informed-only-by-odor-cues-and-how-the-brain-might-internalize-a-representation-of-two-dimensional-olfactory-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/?p=1854","title":{"rendered":"Whether humans can navigate a sensory space informed only by odor cues and how the brain might internalize a representation of two-dimensional olfactory space"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Xiaojun Bao, Eva Gjorgieva, Laura K. Shanahan, James D. Howard, Thorsten Kahnt, and Jay A. Gottfried.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.neuron.2019.03.034\"><strong>Grid-like Neural Representations Support Olfactory Navigation of a Two-Dimensional Odor Space<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0Neuron(2019), https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.neuron.2019.03.034\u00a0<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Grid cells in entorhinal cortex underlie spatial orientation and path finding. <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>Baoet al. show that entorhinal grid-like codes with behavioral relevance emerge when humans mentally navigate an olfactory landscape, highlighting potential neural mechanisms for locating odor sources in odiferous environments<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Highlights<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2022 How the human brain supports navigation in an odorous landscape is poorly understood<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2022 Subjects learn to orient within a 2D intensity space defined by two different odors<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2022 Odor navigation elicits grid-cell-like activity in prefrontal and entorhinal cortices<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2022 Findings suggest a mechanism by which the brain constructs olfactory cognitive maps<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/ars.els-cdn.com\/content\/image\/1-s2.0-S0896627319302971-gr1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/ars.els-cdn.com\/content\/image\/1-s2.0-S0896627319302971-gr1.jpg\" width=\"657\" height=\"367\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Fig.\u00a0Experimental Design and Navigation Performance. Source:\u00a0Bao et al. 2019.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In this study, they asked human subjects to mentally navigate along a trajectory defined by a \u201cstart\u201d odor and an \u201cend\u201d odor and to indicate whether their predicted translation corresponded to the veridical end odor. Success on this task requires access to an internalized map of odor space, and their behavioral data revealed above-chance accuracy in orienting within this space. They demonstrate that grid-like representations with hexagonal periodicity emerged in ERC and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) during olfactory navigation, with grid strength in ERC correlating with behavioral performance across subjects. Their findings reveal that two-dimensional arrays of odor intensities, which themselves cannot be topographically encoded as a set of Cartesian coordinates on the olfactory epithelial sheet, nevertheless map onto grid-like scaffolds that can support spatial orientation and route planning within an olfactory space.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>For further info, please read the paper Bao et al. 2019.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Xiaojun Bao, Eva Gjorgieva, Laura K. Shanahan, James D. Howard, Thorsten Kahnt, and Jay A. Gottfried.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.neuron.2019.03.034\"><strong>Grid-like Neural Representations Support Olfactory Navigation of a Two-Dimensional Odor Space<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0Neuron(2019), https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.neuron.2019.03.034\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Xiaojun Bao, Eva Gjorgieva, Laura K. Shanahan, James D. Howard, Thorsten Kahnt, and Jay A. Gottfried.\u00a0Grid-like Neural Representations Support Olfactory Navigation of a Two-Dimensional Odor Space.\u00a0Neuron(2019), https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.neuron.2019.03.034\u00a0 Grid cells in entorhinal cortex underlie spatial orientation and path finding. Baoet al. show that entorhinal grid-like codes with behavioral relevance emerge when humans mentally navigate an olfactory [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,346],"tags":[467,103,282,466],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1855,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854\/revisions\/1855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}