Getting out the caliper: Behavioral quantification of perceptual odor similarity

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Abstract

Rigorously quantifying perceptual similarity is essential to link sensory stimuli to neural activity and to define the dimensionality of perceptual space, which is challenging for the chemical senses in particular. Nakayama, Gerkin, and Rinberg present an efficient delayed match-to-sample behavioral paradigm that promises to provide a metric for odor similarity.