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REVIEW-ARTICLE

Odor Perception and Olfactory Bulb Plasticity in Adult Mammals

¹Laboratoire de Neurosciences Sensorielles, Comportement, Cognition, Université de Lyon and Unité Mixte de Recherche du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 5020, Lyon, France; and ²Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

ABSTRACT

The adult mammalian olfactory bulb (OB) is unique in that olfactory sensory neurons project directly, without prior thalamic relay, to the OB. This review discusses evidence for the direct involvement of the OB in odor perception and its modulation by olfactory experience. We first discuss recent data showing that the OB exhibits a high level of plasticity in response to olfactory experience including exposure, enrichment, and learning. We next review evidence showing that, in return, experimental manipulation of the OB neural network changes how odorants are processed and perceived. We finally review in more detail a few experiments showing a tight correlation between the modulation of OB neural processing and odor perception. We argue that the OB has evolved to be an adapting network, allowing animals to adjust olfactory computations to changing environments.