Information-theoretic analysis of realistic odor plumes: What cues are useful for determining location?

by Sebastian D. Boie, Erin G. Connor, Margaret McHugh, Katherine I. Nagel, G. Bard Ermentrout, John P. Crimaldi, Jonathan D. Victor Many species rely on olfaction to navigate towards food sources or mates. Olfactory navigation is a challenging task since odor environments are typically turbulent. While time-averaged odor concentration varies smoothly with the distance to the source, instaneous concentrations are intermittent a nd obtaining stable averages takes longer than the typical intervals between animals’ navigation decisions. How to effectively sample from the odor distribution to determine sampling location is the focus on this article. To investigate which sampling strategies are most informative about the loca tion of an odor source, we recorded three naturalistic stimuli with planar lased-induced fluorescence and used an information-theoretic approach to quantify the information that different sampling strategies provide about sampling location. Specifically, we compared multiple sampling strategies base d on a fixed number of coding bits for encoding the olfactory stimulus. When the coding bits were all allocated to representing odor concentration at a single sensor, information rapidly saturated. Using the same number of coding bits in two sensors provides more information, as does coding multiple samples at different times. When accumulating multiple samples at a fixed location, the temporal sequence does not yield a large amount of information and can be ave...
Source: PLoS Computational Biology - Category: Biology Authors: Source Type: research