Abstract
Sensory stimuli evoke complex spatiotemporal patterns of neuronal activity. Are all features of this activity relevant for behaviour? What role do ‘irrelevant’ features play? We addressed these questions in the mammalian olfactory system, where neural activity in the olfactory bulb encodes odor stimuli and transmits odor-related information to higher brain areas. Utilizing pattern optogenetics for control over evoked neural activity, we created synthetic odor stimuli to explore the relevance of various neural features for stimulus readout. We found that earlier neural activity contains more behaviourally relevant information than later activity. Both spatial (identifying which neurons) and temporal (timing of neuron firing) features prove crucial in shaping the percept of a sensory object. We draw connections between our findings and natural odor processing, proposing that the structure of information relevance is defined by concentration-invariant odor recognition. Additionally, we investigate the later activity of odor-evoked temporal sequences in the olfactory bulb, presumed to be irrelevant for odor recognition, and suggest its role in forming an odor map in higher brain areas.
Biography
Dr. Dmitry Rinberg is a Professor of Neuroscience at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where he has been on the faculty since 2012. Originally trained as a physicist, he earned his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science and transitioned to neuroscience during his postdoctoral studies. He established his first independent research program at the Janelia Research Campus (HHMI) before joining NYU. His lab develops tools and experimental approaches to study olfactory circuits and behavior, from precise optogenetics to new ways of interfacing with the brain and measuring perception in animals. Alongside this experimental work, the Rinberg lab has contributed to the development of a theoretical framework for how olfactory information is represented in the brain. His work advances our basic understanding of olfactory processing while enabling emerging applications such as odor-based disease diagnostics.