ABSTRACT
The sense of smell informs animals about the world around them. The job of the olfactory system is challenging: it detects vast numbers of volatile chemicals in wide ranges of concentrations, and it translates these encounters into the spiking language of neural activity. The olfactory system provides researchers an important example of information processing achieved by well-dened populations of neurons. In this chapter, we review recent work investigating how olfactory systems accomplish this goal. We focus particularly on ways neural representations of an odorant’s identity and concentration are transformed as this information moves through successive populations of neurons. These transformations can be understood as changes in the number and timing of spikes.
