Abstract
Odorants of behaviorally relevant objects (e.g., food sources) intermingle with those from other sources. Therefore, to sniff out whether an odor source is good or bad – without actually visiting it – animals first need to segregate the odorants from different sources. To do so, animals could use temporal cues, since odorants from one source exhibit correlated fluctuations, while odorants from different sources are less correlated. However, it remains unclear whether animals can rely solely on temporal cues for odor source segregation. Here we show that flies can use temporal differences in odorant arrival down to 5 milliseconds to segregate mixtures of attractive and aversive odorants, and odor source segregation works for odorants with innate, as well as learned valences. Thus, the insect olfactory system can use stimulus timing for olfactory object segregation, similar as mammalian auditory or visual systems use stimulus timing for concurrent sound segregation and figure-ground segregation.