Making sense of scents: Mice can identify specific odors amid complex olfactory environments

Date:

August 3, 2014

Source:

Harvard University

Summary:

Exactly how animals separate the smells of objects of interest, such as food sources or the scent of predators, from background information has remained largely unknown. Even the extent to which animals can make such distinctions, and how differences between scents might affect the process were largely a mystery -- until now. A new study shows that while mice can be trained to detect specific odorants embedded in random mixtures, their performance drops steadily with increasing background components.

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