@phdthesis{oai:oist.repo.nii.ac.jp:00002809,
 author = {Purser, Aliya Mari},
 month = {2022-10-05, 2022-10-05},
 note = {Odors naturally exist as mixtures in the environment. Detecting relevant cues amidst other signals and noise, a task called figure-ground segregation, is important for survival. Understanding mechanisms that enable animals to solve such a challenging task requires a paradigm that recapitulates key features of the task, yet ideally should be simple enough that allows these mechanistic bases to be studied experimentally. In my PhD, I developed a behavioral paradigm using only binary mixtures as a model for olfactory figure-ground segregation in mice. Ethyl butyrate (EB) was assigned as target odor and ten other background odors with differing degrees of chemical similarity to EB were included as part of a Go/No-Go task. The fact that the mixtures comprised only two odors made the number of possible odor combinations limited, which therefore made the paradigm tractable and ensured that all combinations can be presented exhaustively per behavioral session. Despite its simplicity, I demonstrate that the experimental paradigm can still impose a degree of challenge for mice through the use of a highly similar background odor. This captures recent findings that the degree of overlap between odor-evoked neural representations underlies figure-ground segregation difficulty. Additionally, it was determined that mice performing the binary mixture task can easily generalize when presented with a novel odor, which suggests that demixing is likely involved. Finally, two example cases are presented as examples how the experimental paradigm can be applied to investigate possible neural mechanisms of olfactory figure-ground segregation. Overall, despite its simplicity, the experimental paradigm using only binary mixtures may be used to probe neural mechanisms of olfactory figure-ground segregation.},
 school = {Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University},
 title = {嗅覚における図地分離機構の解明を目的とする実験手法の確立},
 year = {}
}