Odor representations from the two nostrils are temporally segregated in human piriform cortex

Abstract

The human olfactory system has two discrete channels of sensory input, arising from olfactory epithelia housed in the left and right nostrils. Here, we asked whether primary olfactory cortex (piriform cortex, PC) encodes odor information arising from the two nostrils as integrated or distinct stimuli. We recorded intracranial EEG signals directly from PC while human subjects participated in an odor identification task where odors were delivered to the left, right, or both nostrils. We analyzed the time-course of odor-identity coding using machine learning approaches, and found that uni-nostril odor inputs to the ipsilateral nostril are encoded ~480 ms faster than odor inputs to the contralateral nostril on average. During naturalistic bi-nostril odor sampling, odor information emerged in two temporally segregated epochs with the first epoch corresponding to the ipsilateral and the second epoch corresponding to the contralateral odor representations. These findings reveal that PC maintains distinct representations of odor input from each nostril through temporal segregation, highlighting an olfactory coding scheme at the cortical level that can parse odor information across nostrils within the course of a single inhalation.