Abstracts - Association for Chemoreception Sciences

#P201 POSTER SESSION IV:
CHEMICAL SIGNALING AND BEHAVIOR;
ANIMAL BEHAVIOR/PSYCHOPHYSICS;
CHEMOSENSATION AND METABOLISM;
VOMERONSASAL AND CHEMICAL
COMMUNICATION
#P202 POSTER SESSION IV:
CHEMICAL SIGNALING AND BEHAVIOR;
ANIMAL BEHAVIOR/PSYCHOPHYSICS;
CHEMOSENSATION AND METABOLISM;
VOMERONSASAL AND CHEMICAL
COMMUNICATION
Evidence of neonatal memory of odor configuration
Gérard Coureaud 1 , Thierry Thomas-Danguin 1 , Donald A. Wilson 2 ,
Guillaume Ferreira 3
1
CSGA - Centre des Sciences du Goût et de l’Alimentation /
Developmental Ethology and Cognitive Psychology Team & Flavour
Perception Team Dijon, France, 2 Emotional Brain Institute / New York
University School of Medicine New York, NY, USA, 3 Nutrition and
Integrative Neurobiology (NutriNeuro) Group / INRA 1286, Université
de Bordeaux Bordeaux, France
The perception of some mixtures of odorants engages
configural abilities, i.e. the perception of these mixtures as
single odor objects. For instance, data in human adults
demonstrated that a mixture of two odorants (AB), one smelling
like strawberry and the other like caramel, generates the
configural perception of the odor of pineapple (Le Berre et al.,
2008; Barkat et al., 2012). Configural processing may be adaptive
also for young organisms, to which rapid extraction of chemical
information from the maternal environment, highly complex,
is a prerequisite to survival. Thus, results in newborn rabbits
suggest the perception of a unique odor in the AB mixture
(smelling like configural pineapple in humans) and different
from the odors of the elements (Coureaud et al., 2008, 2009a).
To clearly demonstrate that the configural AB perception does
not directly depend on A and B perception, we investigated here
whether rabbit neonates recognize the AB mixture even in the
absence of A and B recognition. To that goal, rabbit pups were
conditioned to AB on day 1. On day 2, recall of A and recall of
B were followed by intraperitoneal injection of either saline or
a pharmacological amnesic agent (see Coureaud et al., 2009b,
2011). Testing for behavioral responsiveness to A, B and AB
occurred on day 3. Control pups responded behaviorally to AB
but also to A and B. As expected, the pups injected with the
amnesic agent did not respond to A and to B. However, they
responded to AB, indicating an AB perception independent of
A and B representations. In summary, the present results confirm
the perception by rabbit neonates of a configuration in the
AB mixture, and demonstrate for the first time the neonatal
ability to memorize odor mixtures as configurations independent
of the memory of their elements. Acknowledgements: Supported
by French ANR-2010-JCJC-1410-1 MEMOLAP to GC, TTD
and GF.
Sniffing Strategies in Wild-Type and Olfactory Marker
Protein Knock-Out Mice
Glen J. Golden 1 , Johannes Reisert 1 , Alan Gelperin 1,2
1
Monell Chemical Senses Center Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2 Princeton
Neuroscience Institute, Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton
University Princeton, NJ, USA
Detection and identification of an odor requires nasal
inhalation or sniffing behavior that delivers odorants to the
olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) deep in the nasal cavity. Our
experiments combine behavioral assessment of odor detection
and discrimination tasks with measurements of sniffing behavior
to clarify the strategies a mouse uses when confronted with
odor-based learning tasks and the mechanisms underlying odor
perception. We study the behavior and sniffing patterns of mice
with (WT) or without (KO) functional olfactory marker protein
(OMP), a protein that is responsible for speeding up the time
course of odor-induced responses in ORNs. OMP KO and WT
mice were implanted with wireless pleural pressure sensors to
record sniffing patterns. These mice were then trained and tested
in go/no go odor discrimination tasks to distinguish solvent
(mineral oil) odor from the odor of 1-propanol 10 -4 log dilution.
Upon propanol or solvent exposure, WT mice increased their
sniffing rate from ~4 Hz to 10 Hz and maintained a higher
sniffing rate for rewarded (S+) trials. However, KO mice
continued to increase their sniff rate following the onset of the
odor (S+) and solvent-odor cues (S-) significantly in comparison
to the WT mice (p