Regional autonomy in the peripheral processing of odor signals in newborn rabbits

Abstract

In newborn rabbits, small and apparently arbitrary regions of the olfactory bulb and associated epithelium appear capable of a high degree of odor processing. After medial or lateral removal of up to 80% of the olfactory bulbs, including the accessory bulb, newborn pups were still able to respond appropriately to the pheromone-governing suckling behavior (Expt. I), could rapidly learn to associate a novel, artificial odor with suckling (Expt. II), and continued to respond appropriately to artificial odors learned prior to lesioning (Expt. III). These findings suggest that the perception and recognition of such suckling signals does not depend on the integration of information from the entire bulb or epithelium, and question the extent to which patterns of 2-deoxyglucose uptake in the bulb reflect the neural coding for specific odors. However, as the tasks set here only required detection of odor signals and not true odor discrimination, it may still be that the full bulbar pattern of activation is necessary for higher-order processing, such as distinguishing between odors and attributing different meanings to them.