Two distinct neural pathways for mechanical versus digital technology.

Technology pervades every aspect of our lives, making it crucial to investigate how the human mind deals with it. Here we examine the cognitive and neural foundations of technological cognition. In the first fMRI experiment, participants viewed videos depicting the use of mechanical tools (e.

Investigating the human chemical communication of positive emotions using a virtual reality-based mood induction.

Humans can communicate their emotions to others via volatile emissions from their bodies. Although there is now solid evidence for human chemical communication of fear, stress and anxiety, investigations of positive emotions remain scarce. In a recent study, we found that women's heart rate and performance in creativity tasks were modulated by body odors of men sampled while they were in a positive vs.

Systematic MRI in persistent post-Covid-19 olfactory dysfunction should be reassessed.

Background: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the gold standard in the etiological assessment of a persistent olfactory dysfunction (OD). While the utility of imaging in COVID-19-related OD has yet to be established, MRI is recommended in all patients with persistent OD. The high prevalence of the latter after SARS-CoV-2 infection means evaluating this strategy is an important public health matter.

And I'm feeling good: effect of emotional sweat and perfume on others' physiology, verbal responses, and creativity.

Emotions can be communicated in social contexts through chemosignals contained in human body odors. The transmission of positive emotions via these signals has received little interest in past research focused mainly on negative emotional transmission. Furthermore, how the use of perfumed products might modulate this transmission remains poorly understood.

Recovery From COVID-19-Related Olfactory Disorders and Quality of Life: Insights From an Observational Online Study.

Although olfactory disorders (OD) are among the most significant symptoms of COVID-19, recovery time from COVID-19-related OD and their consequences on the quality of life remain poorly documented. We investigated the characteristics and behavioral consequences of COVID-19-related OD using a large-scale study involving 3111 French respondents (78% women) to an online questionnaire over a period of 9 months covering different epidemic waves (from 8 April 2020 to 13 January 2021). In the patients who subjectively recovered from COVID-19-related OD (N = 609), recovery occurred on average after 16 days and most of the time within 1 month ("normal" recovery range); 49 subjectively recovered in 1-2.

Neural processing of the reward value of pleasant odorants.

Pleasant odorants are represented in the posterior olfactory bulb (pOB) in mice. How does this hedonic information generate odor-motivated behaviors? Using optogenetics, we report here that stimulating the representation of pleasant odorants in a sensory structure, the pOB, can be rewarding, self-motivating, and is accompanied by ventral tegmental area activation. To explore the underlying neural circuitry downstream of the olfactory bulb (OB), we use 3D high-resolution imaging and optogenetics and determine that the pOB preferentially projects to the olfactory tubercle, whose increased activity is related to odorant attraction.

Visual Priming Influences Olfactomotor Response and Perceptual Experience of Smells.

Whereas contextual influences in the visual and auditory domains have been largely documented, little is known about how chemical senses might be affected by our multisensory environment. In the present study, we aimed to better understand how a visual context can affect the perception of a rather pleasant (floral) and a rather unpleasant (damp) odor. To this end, 19 healthy participants performed a series of tasks including odor detection followed by perceptual evaluations of odor intensity, pleasantness, flowery, and damp characters of both odors presented at 2 different concentrations.

Chemical features mining provides new descriptive structure-odor relationships.

An important goal in researching the biology of olfaction is to link the perception of smells to the chemistry of odorants. In other words, why do some odorants smell like fruits and others like flowers? While the so-called stimulus-percept issue was resolved in the field of color vision some time ago, the relationship between the chemistry and psycho-biology of odors remains unclear up to the present day. Although a series of investigations have demonstrated that this relationship exists, the descriptive and explicative aspects of the proposed models that are currently in use require greater sophistication.

Non-imaged based method for matching brains in a common anatomical space for cellular imagery.

Background: Cellular imagery using histology sections is one of the most common techniques used in Neuroscience. However, this inescapable technique has severe limitations due to the need to delineate regions of interest on each brain, which is time consuming and variable across experimenters.

New Method: We developed algorithms based on a vectors field elastic registration allowing fast, automatic realignment of experimental brain sections and associated labeling in a brain atlas with high accuracy and in a streamlined way.

Learning to name smells increases activity in heteromodal semantic areas.

Semantic description of odors is a cognitively demanding task. Learning to name smells is, however, possible with training. This study set out to examine how improvement in olfactory semantic knowledge following training reorganizes the neural representation of smells.

Expertise shapes domain-specific functional cerebral asymmetry during mental imagery: the case of culinary arts and music.

Mental imagery in experts has been documented in visual arts, music and dance. Here, we examined this issue in an understudied art domain, namely, culinary arts. Previous research investigating mental imagery in experts has reported either a stronger involvement of the right hemisphere or bilateral brain activation.

Viewing Olfactory Affective Responses Through the Sniff Prism: Effect of Perceptual Dimensions and Age on Olfactomotor Responses to Odors.

Sniffing, which is the active sampling of olfactory information through the nasal cavity, is part of the olfactory percept. It is influenced by stimulus properties, affects how an odor is perceived, and is sufficient (without an odor being present) to activate the olfactory cortex. However, many aspects of the affective correlates of sniffing behavior remain unclear, in particular the modulation of volume and duration as a function of odor hedonics.

Altered Affective Evaluations of Smells in Alzheimer's Disease.

Background: Studies of olfaction in Alzheimer's disease (AD) mainly focused on deficits in odor detection and identification, with very few investigations of olfactory emotional changes and their consequences for hedonics.

Objective: The aim of the present study was to characterize affective evaluations of odors in AD patients.

Methods: To this end, 20 AD patients and 20 matched controls were tested.

Statistical network analysis for functional MRI: summary networks and group comparisons.

Comparing networks in neuroscience is hard, because the topological properties of a given network are necessarily dependent on the number of edges in that network. This problem arises in the analysis of both weighted and unweighted networks. The term density is often used in this context, in order to refer to the mean edge weight of a weighted network, or to the number of edges in an unweighted one.

Hedonic appreciation and verbal description of pleasant and unpleasant odors in untrained, trainee cooks, flavorists, and perfumers.

Olfaction is characterized by a salient hedonic dimension. Previous studies have shown that these affective responses to odors are modulated by physicochemical, physiological, and cognitive factors. The present study examined expertise influenced processing of pleasant and unpleasant odors on both perceptual and verbal levels.

Group analysis of self-organizing maps based on functional MRI using restricted Frechet means.

Studies of functional MRI data are increasingly concerned with the estimation of differences in spatio-temporal networks across groups of subjects or experimental conditions. Unsupervised clustering and independent component analysis (ICA) have been used to identify such spatio-temporal networks. While these approaches have been useful for estimating these networks at the subject-level, comparisons over groups or experimental conditions require further methodological development.