The structure of human olfactory space
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1
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, United States
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2
Columbia University, Department of Biological Science, United States
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3
HHMI, Janelia farm, United States
Our understanding of the sense of smell is hindered by the lack of a well-defined perceptual space and knowledge of how this space is related to the properties of odorant molecules. Here we analyze the psychophysical responses of human observers to an ensemble of monomolecular odorants. Each odorant is characterized by a set of 146 perceptual descriptors obtained from a database of odor character profiles. Each odorant is therefore represented by a point in highly multidimensional sensory space. In this work we study the arrangement of odorants in this perceptual space. We argue that odorants densely sample a two-dimensional curved surface embedded in the multidimensional sensory space. This surface can account for more than a half of the variance of the psychophysical data. We also show that only 12%of experimental variance cannot be explained by curved surfaces of substantially small dimensionality (~10). We suggest that these curved manifolds represent the relevant spaces sampled by the human olfactory system, thereby providing surrogates for olfactory sensory space. For the case of 2D approximation, we relate the two parameters on the curved surface to the physico-chemical parameters of odorant molecules. We show that one of the dimensions is related to eigenvalues of molecules’ connectivity matrix, while the other is correlated with measures of molecules’ polarity. We discuss the behavioral significance of these findings.
Conference:
Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, 25 Feb - 2 Mar, 2010.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster session II
Citation:
Koulakov
A,
Enikolopov
A and
Rinberg
D
(2010). The structure of human olfactory space.
Front. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.03.00318
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Received:
08 Mar 2010;
Published Online:
08 Mar 2010.
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Correspondence:
Alexei Koulakov, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, United States, akula@cshl.edu