01-05-2013 | Kaitlin G. Freedman; Sreya Radhakrishna; Olga Escanilla; Christiane Linster, Chemical Senses, 2013

Olfactory habituation is a simple form of nonassociative memory in which responsiveness to stable but behaviorally nonsignificant stimuli is decreased. Olfactory habituation has recently become a paradigm widely used to probe the neural substrate underlying olfactory perception and memory. ...

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01-05-2013 | Jennifer M. Brewer; Adam Y. Shavit; Timothy G. Shepard; Maria G. Veldhuizen; Roshan Parikh; Lawrence E. Marks, Chemical Senses, 2013

Two experiments, using different ranges and numbers of stimuli, examined how linguistic labels affect the identification of flavor mixtures containing different proportions of sucrose (gustatory flavorant) and citral (olfactory flavorant). Both experiments asked subjects to identify each ...

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01-05-2013 | Mikael A Carlsson; Alexander Schäpers; Dick R Nässel; Niklas Janz, Chemical Senses, 2013

Olfaction is in many species the most important sense, essential for food search, mate finding, and predator avoidance. Butterflies have been considered a microsmatic group of insects that mainly rely on vision due to their diurnal lifestyle. However, an emerging number of studies indicate ...

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01-05-2013 | Daniel Münch; Benjamin Schmeichel; Ana F. Silbering; C. Giovanni Galizia, Chemical Senses, 2013

Most odors in natural environments are mixtures of several compounds. Perceptually, these can blend into a new "perfume," or some components may dominate as elements of the mixture. In order to understand such mixture interactions, it is necessary to study the events at the olfactory ...

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01-05-2013 | Robin M. Tucker; Richard D. Mattes, Chemical Senses, 2013

Findings that support the ability of humans to taste nonesterified fatty acids have been qualified by claims of substantial individual variability in sensitivity. We tested whether the number of testing visits impacted detection thresholds. Additionally, we explored the possibility that ...

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01-05-2013 | Sukant Khurana; Obaid Siddiqi, Chemical Senses, 2013

We studied complete dose–response curves for 53 odorants in the third instar larvae of Drosophila melanogaster. All odorants, except one, elicited an attraction response. Some odorants also elicited a decrease from their peak response at higher concentrations. This concentration-dependent ...

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01-05-2013 | Jean-Pierre Rospars, Chemical Senses, 2013

In this issue of Chemical Senses, Münch et al. present a thorough analysis of how mixtures of odorants interact with olfactory receptors (ORs) borne by olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs). Using fruit fly ORNs expressing the receptor OR22a, they provide a clear example of mixture interaction ...

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01-05-2013 | Barry G. Green, Chemical Senses, 2013

Notable progress has been made relating individual differences in bitter taste sensitivity to specific alleles and TAS2R receptors, but psychophysical evidence of reliable phenotypes for other tastes has been more elusive. In this issue, Wise and Breslin report a study of individual ...

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01-05-2013 | Paul M. Wise; Paul A.S. Breslin, Chemical Senses, 2013

Taste sensitivity is assessed with various techniques, including absolute detection and quality recognition. For any stimulus, one might expect individual differences in sensitivity to be reflected in all measures, but they are often surprisingly independent. Here, we focus on sensitivity to ...

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01-05-2013 | Tariq Chukir; Richard B. Darlington; Bruce P. Halpern, Chemical Senses, 2013

The long-chain 18-carbon fatty acids linoleic, oleic, and stearic acids, retronasally in vapor phase, are discriminated from blanks and each other. However, ability to linguistically identify them was unknown. To explore this, a Focus Group and then Check-All-That-Apply measures gave 9 ...

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