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"When a rat smells a cat": the distribution of Fos immunoreactivity in rat brain following exposure to a predatory odor.

Wistar rats were exposed to a fabric collar that had been worn by a domestic cat. Exposure took place in an open rectangular arena containing a small wooden "hide box". Rats exposed to cat odor spent more than 87% of their time in the hide box during a single 20-min exposure session, whereas rats exposed to a control odor (an unworn collar) spent less than 20% of their time hiding. One hour following this session, rats were killed and Fos immunoreactivity was compared between cat odor-exposed rats, control odor-exposed rats and an additional group that had remained in their home cages. Cat odor-exposed rats showed greater Fos expression than controls in many brain regions, particularly in the medial amygdala, medial hypothalamus and periaqueductal gray. Significant findings included strong and selective induction of Fos in the posteroventral medial amygdaloid nucleus, the premamillary nucleus (dorsal part), ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus (dorsomedial part), dorsomedial hypothalamic nucleus, periaqueductal gray (dorsomedial, dorsolateral and ventrolateral parts) and the cuneiform nucleus. Robust Fos expression in the ventromedial hypothalamus, premamillary nucleus and periaqueductal gray confirms previous suggestions of a role for these areas in predator-induced defensive behavior. Fos immunoreactivity in the medial, but not central or basolateral amygdala is a novel finding and draws attention to this subregion as a possible interface between olfactory input and emotional output.

Animals↗

The nose smells what the eye sees: crossmodal visual facilitation of human olfactory perception.

Human olfactory perception is notoriously unreliable, but shows substantial benefits from visual cues, suggesting important crossmodal integration between these primary sensory modalities. We used event-related fMRI to determine the underlying neural mechanisms of olfactory-visual integration in the human brain. Subjects participated in an olfactory detection task, whereby odors and pictures were delivered separately or together. By manipulating the degree of semantic correspondence between odor-picture pairs, we show a perceptual olfactory facilitation for semantically congruent (versus incongruent) trials. This behavioral advantage was associated with enhanced neural activity in anterior hippocampus and rostromedial orbitofrontal cortex. We suggest these findings can be interpreted as indicating that human hippocampus mediates reactivation of crossmodal semantic associations, even in the absence of explicit memory processing.

Adult↗

How the brain sees smells.

Genetically encoded transneuronal tracers provide the first glimpse into the logic of olfactory processing in higher cortical areas of the brain. The results suggest a complex distributed coding scheme, which is remarkably similar in different individuals.

Amygdala↗

Old-age deficits in the sense of smell as gauged by thresholds, magnitude matching, and odor identification.

Twenty elderly subjects (70-90 years old) and 20 young control subjects (18-24 years old) underwent three kinds of olfactory testing: absolute thresholds to three odorants (d-limonene, iso-amyl butyrate, benzaldehyde), magnitude matching of these odorants to salt tastes, and odor identification of 30 common substances. For all three odorants elderly subjects' mean threshold significantly exceeded that of the young by about ninefold for d-limonene, about threefold for benzaldehyde, and about twofold for iso-amyl butyrate. These threshold differences predict approximate concentration differences necessary to arouse the same estimated odor strength above the threshold for the elderly and the young. Young subjects also scored better than the elderly in odor identification, even when subjects were given four alternatives from which to select the correct label. Unimpaired olfactory functioning is uncommon in the elderly; correlational tests show that as a group the young have better olfactory ability and show more interindividual uniformity.

Adolescent↗