Olfactory plasticity

The sense of smell is a sensory system that is characterized by both large inter- as well as intra- individual differences. The sense of smell is also very plastic where sensitivity towards individual odors can shift either rapidly or over time. Under the leadership of Dr. Lundström, the general aim of this project is to understand what the neural mechanisms, and their behavioral consequences, are that allow the sense of smell to adapt so fast to our environment. In doing this, we assess behavioral and neural measures in both healthy individuals as well as clinical populations with various etiology.

Data and code associated with this project can be found here and here.

Perceptual sickness cues

Contagious diseases have been one of the most fatal threats throughout evolution. Recent research suggests that behavioral avoidance of sick individuals is the first, and probably most cost effective, line of defense against infection. In this project, under the leadership of Dr. Mats Olsson, we will determine the behavioral cues by which we detect disease; the mechanisms underlying the basic emotional and cognitive processes motivating and optimizing disease avoidance; and how perceptual detection prepares the body for an attack together with classic immunity.

Links between breathing and performance

Respiration is one of the fundamental rhythms of life, with its effects stretching far beyond basic oxygenation. Recent studies have demonstrated that breathing modulates how we process basic perceptual stimuli and tentative evidence also indicate that breathing might regulate cognitive processes. In this project under the leadership of Dr. Artin Arshamian, we are assessing how this rhythmic activity, repeated 9-24 times each minute, shapes basic perception and cognition and what neural mechanisms allow this integration between breathing and perception/cognition.

Multisensory integration with odors

Outside the confined environment of the laboratory, smells are very rarely experienced by themselves, without the contextual information provided by our other senses. This project, under the leadership of Dr. Johan Lundström, is concerned with two fundamental perceptual neuroscience question: how is congruent information from our other sensory modalities influencing the processing of odors and what role does the olfactory cortex, if any, have in this?

In this project, we are also investigating how intranasal and intraoral pain (TRPV1 etc receptors, i.e. trigeminal sensations) interact with our other senses and change the overall perception.

Neural processing of flavors

Every time we place food in our mouth, we evaluate its sensory properties in a split second: is it a safe source of energy that should be swallowed, or a potential health threat that should be spit out? Getting this simple binary decision right is crucial for maintaining the balance between sufficient calorie intake on the one hand, and avoidance of accidental poisoning on the other. The goal of this project, under the leadership of Dr. Janina Seubert, aims to establish the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying perceptual decision-making on flavor stimuli inside the oral cavity, and to demonstrate their necessary role in the adaptive regulation of food intake behavior.

Human olfactory bulb processing

We recently demonstrated a new method to measure signals from the human olfactory bulb, an area of the human brain that that was not accessible without resorting to intracranial recordings. We are in this project, under the leadership of Dr. Johan Lundström, assessing what role the olfactory bulb has in human odor perception and action. Moreover, we are also assessing whether this measure might serve as an early indicator of Parkinson’s disease.

Data and code associated with this project can be found here