Aversive outcomes impact human olfactory discrimination learning and generalization.

Learning associations between sensory stimuli and outcomes, and generalizing these associations to novel stimuli, are a fundamental feature of adaptive behavior. Given a noisy olfactory world, stimulus generalization holds unique relevance for the olfactory system. Recent studies suggest that aversive outcomes induce wider generalization curves by modulating discrimination thresholds, but evidence for similar processes in olfaction does not exist.

De Novo Emergence of Odor Category Representations in the Human Brain.

Unlabelled: Categorization allows organisms to efficiently extract relevant information from a diverse environment. Because of the multidimensional nature of odor space, this ability is particularly important for the olfactory system. However, categorization relies on experience, and the processes by which the human brain forms categorical representations about new odor percepts are currently unclear.