Connectionists: Olfactory research needs to shift from solely focusing on processing syntactic (or Shannon) information to processing semantic, i.e., odorant identity information

[Aurel A. Lazar]

Most of the experiments in the olfactory literature, assume that the odorant identity is known.
As such, prior arts have primarily focused on the representation of odorant syntactic information
(i.e., concentration amplitude) and cannot, therefore, serve as baseline methods without a formal
computational/theoretic model of odorant identity. In contrast we argue in the paper below that
odor signal processing in the Early Olfactory System of the fruit fly, is mostly focussed on extracting
semantic information.
Consequently, we assert that olfactory research needs to shift from solely focusing on processing
syntactic (or Shannon) information to processing semantic, i.e., odorant identity information.

Modeling and characterization of pure and odorant mixture
processing in the Drosophila mushroom body calyx
Aurel A. Lazar, Tingkai Liu, Chung-Heng Yeh and Yiyin Zhou


https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2024.1410946
Frontiers | Modeling and characterization of pure and odorant mixture processing in the Drosophila mushroom body calyx
doi.org


Results in brief:
(i) Odorant stimuli are modeled by their identity (semantics) and concentration amplitude (syntactic) information content.
(ii) The Antennal Lobe and Calyx jointly separate the odorant semantics from syntactic information.
(iii) The semantics info is mapped by the Calyx into a first spike sequence for easy memory access in the Mushroom Body.

Aurel
http://www.bionet.ee.columbia.edu <http://www.bionet.ee.columbia.edu/>

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