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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on April 28, 2008
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn058
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Published by Oxford University Press 2008.

The Human Brain Distinguishes between Single Odorants and Binary Mixtures

Julie A. Boyle1,2, Jelena Djordjevic2, Mats J. Olsson3,4, Johan N. Lundström1,2 and Marilyn Jones-Gotman1,2

1 Department of Psychology, 2 Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University, H3A 2T5 Montreal, QC, Canada, 3 Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, SE-751 05 Uppsala, Sweden, 4 Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Section for Psychology, Karolinska Institute, 171 77 Stockholm, Sweden

Address correspondence to Julie A. Boyle, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, 3801 University Street, Room 276, Montreal, QC H3A 2B4, Canada. Email: julie.boyle{at}mcgill.ca.

Single odors are processed differently from odor mixtures in the cortex of rodents. We investigated whether single and binary odor mixtures activate different regions also in the human brain. We analyzed data from positron emission tomography scans using pyridine, citral, and 5 mixtures of pyridine and citral in proportions varying from 10/90 to 90/10, with 50/50 being the most impure. Comparing mixtures with single odorants gave activation in the left cingulate and right parietal and superior frontal cortices and bilateral activation in the anterior and lateral orbitofrontal cortices. We also found that brain activity in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) increased with odorant impurity, whereas the anterior OFC was activated for binary odor mixtures and deactivated for single components. We conclude that binary odor mixtures and their individual components are processed differently by the human brain. The lateral portion of the OFC responds to mixture impurity in a graded fashion, whereas the anterior portion acts like an on–off detector of odor mixtures.

Key Words: imaging • odor mixture • orbitofrontal cortex • positron emission tomography • smell


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