Abstracts - Association for Chemoreception Sciences

wing. Philip Callahan exposed insect gustatory chemosensillae to
negatively charged aniline blue droplets and found them to
migrate to the tip. D.K. Edwards has noted that flies vigorously
rub their front legs together and groom their wings when exposed
to sudden changes in the electrical field. This author and countless
others have noted wing-fanning behavior in moths when abruptly
exposed to their own pheromone. Auto-electrification can be
achieved by ordinary flight, by wing-fanning behavior, by the
rubbing together of leg pairs, and by the self-grooming of their
wings. Each of these is known to increase the positive charges
found on the surface of an insect’s cuticle. Due to the electrical
point effect, these charges will be focused on pointed structures or
tips such as the antennae, the wings, and the sensillae. Odorant
molecules will be preferentially attracted to these regions of the
insect body. This will allow charged airborne molecules, especially
in low concentrations, to be more easily detected by insects.
#P308 POSTER SESSION VI:
PERIPHERAL AND CENTRAL TASTE;
PERIPHERAL OLFACTION
Implicit modulation of preferences for odors by explicit choices
in long-term memory
Géraldine Coppin 1,2 , Sylvain Delplanque 1,2 , Charlène Fournier 1,2 ,
David Sander 1,2
1
Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva,
Geneva, Switzerland, 2 Laboratory for the study of Emotion
Elicitation and Expression (E3 Lab), University of Geneva,
Geneva, Switzerland
Several studies have shown that preferences can be strongly
modulated by cognitive processes such as decision making and
choices. Remarkably, it has been demonstrated that explicit
choices, traditionally considered as a reflection of preferences, can
in fact create them. However, it is still unclear whether choices
can influence preferences of sensory stimuli in an implicit way and
if such a modulation is stable over time. This question was
addressed here by asking participants to evaluate odors, to choose
their preferred odors among pairs, to re-evaluate odors, and to
perform an unexpected memory test concerning their choices.
After one week, participants were asked to evaluate one more
time the odors, and to do choices between pairs similar to those
presented the previous week. Results revealed the existence of
post-choice preference changes, in the sense of an overvaluation of
chosen odors and a devaluation of rejected ones, even when
choices were forgotten. These results suggest that chemosensory
preferences can be modulated by explicit choices and that such
modulation might rely on implicit mechanisms. This finding rules
out any explanation of post-choice preference changes in terms of
experimental demand and strongly challenges the classical
cognitive dissonance reduction account of such preference
changes. Moreover, preliminary results showed that this choiceinduced
preference modulation was still present after one week
and the congruence between the choices made the first time and
after one week was high. This result invites to further consider the
importance of implicit processing in preference acquisition and
stability across time.
#P309 POSTER SESSION VI:
PERIPHERAL AND CENTRAL TASTE;
PERIPHERAL OLFACTION
The eyes see what the nose smells: Olfactory modulation of
visual perception in binocular rivalry
Wen Zhou 1,3 , Yi Jiang 1 , Sheng He 2 , Denise Chen 3
1
Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China, 2 Chinese Academy
of Sciences Beijing, China, 3 University of Minnesota Minneapolis,
MN, USA, 4 Rice University Houston, TX, USA
Vision is widely accepted as the dominant sense in humans and
other primates, whereas olfaction is often considered a vestigial
sense yielding only obscure object representations. It is well
documented that vision drives olfactory perception, but the
converse is hardly known. Here we introduce smells to a wellestablished
visual phenomenon termed binocular rivalry,
perceptual alternations that occur when distinctively different
images are separately presented to the two eyes. We show that an
odorant congruent to one of the competing images prolongs its
dominance duration and shortens its suppression time in a manner
that is automatic, independent of cognitive control, and partly
subconscious. Our findings provide the first direct evidence that a
non-visual sensory cue biases the dynamic process of binocular
rivalry, thereby demonstrating olfactory modulation of visual
perception – an effect that has been hitherto unsuspected.
Acknowledgements: This work was supported by NIH
R03DC4956 and the Knowledge Innovation Program of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-YW-R-250 and
09CX192019).
#P310 POSTER SESSION VI:
PERIPHERAL AND CENTRAL TASTE;
PERIPHERAL OLFACTION
Virus-infected female mice attract male mice through
pheromone up-regulation
Koichi Matsumura 1 , Maryanne Opiekun 1 , Takuya Tashiro 2 ,
Kenji Mori 2 , Kunio Yamazaki 1 , Gary K. Beauchamp 1
1
Monell Chemical Senses Center Philadelphia, PA, USA,
2
RIKEN Research Center for Allergy and Immunology
Kanagawa, Japan
Mouse mammary tumor virus (MMTV), a retrovirus that can be
transferred from the mother mouse to her pups through her milk,
causes mammary adenocarcinoma tumors. The virus is widely
distributed in wild mouse populations worldwide suggesting that
some factor acts to maintain the virus in the mouse population.
We previously reported that inbred laboratory mice (C57BL/6
(B6 which is H2 b ) infected with MMTV can be discriminated by
scent from uninfected, genetically identical control mice long
before the development of tumors. We next found that the
amount of 3,4-dehydro-exo-brevicomin (DHB-previously
identified as a pheromone produced by male mice that modulates
inter-male aggression and female estrus cycling) was dramatically
increased in urine of infected female mice. Subsequent studies
demonstrated that, in free-choice tests, mice are attracted to the
scent of MMTV-infected females, of their urine, and of DHBspiked
female urine. To evaluate the generality of these results, we
have now tested females of two other mouse strains: Congenic
B6-H2 k mice with a different MHC haplotype than B6 mice and
BALB/c, an inbred strain that differs from B6 at many genetic
loci. MMTV-infected B6-H2 k mice also showed up-regulation of
DHB production and the urine of infected mice and DHB-spiked
P O S T E R S
Abstracts are printed as submitted by the author(s)
Abstracts | 129