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The Journal of Neuroscience, September 12, 2007, 27(37):10015-10023; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1158-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Predicting Odor Pleasantness from Odorant Structure: Pleasantness as a Reflection of the Physical World

Rehan M. Khan,¹ Chung-Hay Luk,¹ Adeen Flinker,¹ Amit Aggarwal,¹ Hadas Lapid,² Rafi Haddad,² and Noam Sobel²

¹Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, and ²Department of Neurobiology, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel

Correspondence should be addressed to either Rehan M. Khan or Noam Sobel, Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel. Email: rehan{at}berkeley.edu or Email: noam.sobel{at}weizmann.ac.il

Although it is agreed that physicochemical features of molecules determine their perceived odor, the rules governing this relationship remain unknown. A significant obstacle to such understanding is the high dimensionality of features describing both percepts and molecules. We applied a statistical method to reduce dimensionality in both odor percepts and physicochemical descriptors for a large set of molecules. We found that the primary axis of perception was odor pleasantness, and critically, that the primary axis of physicochemical properties reflected the primary axis of olfactory perception. This allowed us to predict the pleasantness of novel molecules by their physicochemical properties alone. Olfactory perception is strongly shaped by experience and learning. However, our findings suggest that olfactory pleasantness is also partially innate, corresponding to a natural axis of maximal discriminability among biologically relevant molecules.

Key words: odor; smell; olfaction; pleasantness; hedonics; valence

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Received March 14, 2007; revised July 17, 2007; accepted July 17, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to either Rehan M. Khan or Noam Sobel, Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel. Email: rehan{at}berkeley.edu or Email: noam.sobel{at}weizmann.ac.il

This article has been cited by other articles:

				H. Lapid, D. Harel, and N. Sobel Prediction Models for the Pleasantness of Binary Mixtures in Olfaction Chem Senses, June 4, 2008; (2008) bjn026v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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