Habituation As a Neural Algorithm for Online Odor Discrimination
Habituation as a neural algorithm for online odor discrimination Yang Shena, Sanjoy Dasguptab, and Saket Navlakhaa,1 aSimons Center for Quantitative Biology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724; and bComputer Science and Engineering Department, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093 Edited by Timothy O’Leary, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Gina G. Turrigiano April 13, 2020 (received for review September 5, 2019) Habituation is a form of simple memory that suppresses neural the extinction of the stimulus. This is in contrast with faster forms activity in response to repeated, neutral stimuli. This process is crit- of habituation, such as odorant receptor neuron (ORN) adapta- ical in helping organisms guide attention toward the most salient tion (17, 18) occurring on the order of hundreds of milliseconds, and novel features in the environment. Here, we follow known and longer forms of habituation, such as long-term habituation circuit mechanisms in the fruit fly olfactory system to derive a (16), which lasts for days. Different time scales of habituation simple algorithm for habituation. We show, both empirically and have also been described in the vertebrate olfactory system (1). analytically, that this algorithm is able to filter out redundant infor- Short-term habituation is of interest because it requires a rela- mation, enhance discrimination between odors that share a similar tively fast online mechanism for its initiation and decay, yet it is background, and improve detection of novel components in odor also stable enough to have a lasting effect. mixtures. Overall, we propose an algorithmic perspective on the Prior work has studied the mechanisms of short-term habitu- biological mechanism of habituation and use this perspective to ation in the mouse and honeybee olfactory circuits (19–22), but understand how sensory physiology can affect odor perception.
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