TY - JOUR T1 - Neural coding of perceived odor intensity JF - eneuro JO - eneuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0083-15.2015 SP - ENEURO.0083-15.2015 AU - Yevgeniy B. Sirotin AU - Roman Shusterman AU - Dmitry Rinberg Y1 - 2015/11/12 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/early/2015/11/12/ENEURO.0083-15.2015.abstract N2 - Stimulus intensity is a fundamental perceptual feature in all sensory systems. In olfaction, perceived odor intensity depends on at least two variables, odor concentration and duration of the odor exposure, or adaptation. To examine how neural activity at early stages of the olfactory system represents features relevant to intensity perception, we studied responses of mitral/tufted cells (MTCs) while manipulating odor concentration and exposure duration. Temporal profiles of MTC responses to odors changed both as a function of concentration and with adaptation. However, despite the complexity of these responses, adaptation and concentration dependencies behaved similarly. These similarities were visualized by principal component analysis of average population responses and quantified by discriminant analysis in a trial-by-trial manner. The qualitative functional dependencies of neuronal responses paralleled psychophysics results in humans. We suggest that temporal patterns of MTC responses in the olfactory bulb contribute to an internal perceptual variable - odor intensity.Significance Statement: Establishing a link between perception and neural activity is one of the major goals of systems neuroscience. Yet, tracking perceptual variables in animal models where one can perform neural recording remains a challenge. Here we demonstrate a consistency between human perception of odor intensity and activity of mitral/tufted cells (MTCs) recorded in the olfactory bulb of awake mice as a function of two physical variables: odor concentration and the duration of odor exposure. Human perception of odor intensity decreased sharply after just one sniff of odor. Consistently, sniff-locked MTC odor responses changed abruptly after the first sniff so as to mimic responses to lower odor concentrations. We suggest that early processing stages may already contribute to an odor intensity percept. ER -