Prelude to a decision: Resolving sensory uncertainty in the human brain

Jay Gottfried  
Northwestern University

Accurate recognition of stimulus identity is a necessary prelude to making effective decisions. In 
experimental models of learning and decision-making, cues and commodities are usually (though 
not always) presented as stable invariant objects, but in naturalistic settings, stimulus noise and 
ambiguity are often the rule. This is particularly true for olfactory stimuli, which are subject to 
the vagaries of wind speed and direction, rely on sniffing for efficient sampling, and occur in the 
company of other smells. Research in our lab combines olfactory functional MRI, sensory 
psychophysics, multivariate pattern analysis, and computational modeling to investigate how 
odor object information is encoded in the human brain, and how learning and experience refine 
odor perception at the behavioral and neural levels. This presentation will focus on recent work 
highlighting the roles of piriform (olfactory) cortex and orbitofrontal cortex in disambiguating 
odor objects and generating predictive codes to enhance behavior.