Proceedings of a Symposium on Cortical Information Processing in the Olfactory System held at the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences (AChemS) on April 28, 2000, in Sarasota, Florida

Abstract

Higher order sensory processes such as perception, memory and emotion are generally ascribed to activity within the cerebral hemispheres. In most sensory systems, cortical processing is believed to be required for the extraction, discrimination and identification of complex features, binding of those features into perceptual wholes, and memory of those perceptions and their associated emotional consequences or context. In parallel with the rapid growth of our understanding of olfactory transduction and peripheral odor coding over the past decade, there has been a marked increase in our understanding of how that peripheral coding is enhanced and embellished within olfactory cortical areas. Accordingly, a symposium was held during the 22nd annual meeting of AChemS, where four speakers discussed the role and mechanisms of cortical information processing in the olfactory system. The talks included a discussion of how detailed analyses of cortical anatomy and physiology can lead to specific, testable predictions of cortical function (Lewis Haberly), a description of receptive fields of olfactory cortical neurons and direct comparison with those of cortical afferents, mitral/tufted cells of the olfactory bulb (Donald Wilson), a description of how behaviorally responsive neuromodulatory inputs such as norepinephrine and acetylcholine can shape olfactory cortical functions important for odor recognition and memory (Michael Hasselmo), and how the cortex associates tastes and odors for flavor representation and remembers hedonic associations of those flavors (Edmund Rolls). The resulting series of manuscripts compiled here represent our current understanding of cortical mechanisms in olfactory sensory processing, and hopefully will encourage future work on the role of the cortex as an important mediator of olfactory sensations, perceptions and memories. This symposium was sponsored by a grant from the National Institutes of Deafness and Communication Disorders (DC02038).