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© 2009 Mandairon et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

In humans, the pleasantness of odors is a major contributor to social relationships and food intake. Smells evoke attraction and repulsion responses, reflecting the hedonic value of the odorant. While olfactory preferences are known to be strongly modulated by experience and learning, it has been recently suggested that, in humans, the pleasantness of odors may be partly explained by the physicochemical properties of the odorant molecules themselves. If odor hedonic value is indeed predetermined by odorant structure, then it could be hypothesized that other species will show similar odor preferences to humans. Combining behavioral and psychophysical approaches, we here show that odorants rated as pleasant by humans were also those which, behaviorally, mice investigated longer and human subjects sniffed longer, thereby revealing for the first time a component of olfactory hedonic perception conserved across species. Consistent with this, we further show that odor pleasantness rating in humans and investigation time in mice were both correlated with the physicochemical properties of the molecules, suggesting that olfactory preferences are indeed partly engraved in the physicochemical structure of the odorant. That odor preferences are shared between mammal species and are guided by physicochemical features of odorant stimuli strengthens the view that odor preference is partially predetermined. These findings open up new perspectives for the study of the neural mechanisms of hedonic perception.

Details

Title
Humans and Mice Express Similar Olfactory Preferences
Author
Mandairon, Nathalie; Poncelet, Johan; Bensafi, Moustafa; Didier, Anne
First page
e4209
Section
Research Article
Publication year
2009
Publication date
Jan 2009
Publisher
Public Library of Science
e-ISSN
19326203
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1289677225
Copyright
© 2009 Mandairon et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.