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Chemical Senses Advance Access first published online on December 8, 2005
This version published online on February 1, 2006
Chemical Senses, doi:10.1093/chemse/bjj012
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Accepted November 9, 2005

Article

The Sniff Is Part of the Olfactory Percept

Joel Mainland 1 * and Noam Sobel 1

1 Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Joel Mainland, E-mail: mainland{at}berkeley.edu


  Abstract

In this review, we use data obtained primarily from humans to argue that sniffs are not merely a stimulus carrier but are rather a central component of the olfactory percept. We argue that sniffs 1) are necessary for the olfactory percept, 2) affect odorant intensity perception and identity perception, 3) drive activity in olfactory cortex, 4) are rapidly modulated in an odorant-dependent fashion by a dedicated olfactomotor system, and 5) are sufficient to generate an olfactory percept of some sort even in the absence of odor.

Keywords: humans; odor coding; odor intensity; olfactomotor; psychophysics; sniff.
Figure 8 is now in color.
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