OLFACTORY INFORMATION-PROCESSING IN THE BRAIN - ENCODING CHEMICAL ANDTEMPORAL FEATURES OF ODORS

A fundamental problem in studying the neural mechanisms of odor recogn ition and discrimination in the olfactory system lies in determining t he features or ''primitives'' of an odor stimulus that are analyzed by glomerular circuits at the first level of processing in the brain, Se veral recent studies support the idea that it is not simply the molecu lar features of odors that contain important information, but also the intermittent pattern of their presentation to the olfactory epitheliu m that helps determine the behavioral response to odor. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.