Abstract
Critical animal behaviors, especially among rodents, are guided by odors in remarkably well-coordinated manners. While many extramodal sensory cues compete for cognitive resources in these ecological contexts, that rodents can engage in such odor-guided behaviors suggests that they selectively attend to odors. We developed an operant task to reveal that rats are indeed capable of selectively attending to odors in the presence of competing extramodal stimuli and found that this selective attention facilitates accurate odor-guided behavior. Further, we uncovered that attention to odors adaptively sharpens their representation among individual neurons in a brain region considered integral for odor-driven behaviors. Thus, selective attention contributes to olfaction in rodents in a manner analogous to that observed for other sensory systems in more cognitively-advanced animals.