TY - JOUR T1 - Selective attention controls olfaction in rodents JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/236331 SP - 236331 AU - Kaitlin S. Carlson AU - Marie A. Gadziola AU - Emma S. Dauster AU - Daniel W. Wesson Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/03/236331.abstract N2 - 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 a behavioral paradigm 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 decisions. Further, we uncovered that attention to odors adaptively sharpens their representation among neurons in a brain region considered integral for odor-driven behaviors. Thus, selective attention contributes to olfaction by enhancing the coding of odors in a manner analogous to that observed among other sensory systems.This work was supported by NIH NIDCD grants R01DC014443 and R01DC016519 to D.W. and F31DC014615 to K.C. We thank Dr. Ben Strowbridge for helpful discussions throughout this study. ER -