Author summary
A major challenge in the study of the Drosophila early olfactory sensory system is to
determine how an odorant object (the smell of a rose) is reliably identified in the face of
fluctuations of the concentration amplitude of the molecules within the odorant plume.
More fundamentally, the question arises how semantic information, often associated
with subjective perception, can be characterized. To address this challenge, we
leveraged the unique combinatorial odorant code of Drosophila and presented a formal
treatment of the identity of an odorant object as its semantic information (or semantics
for short). Grounded in the physiology of the fly brain, we identified the functional roles
played by Local Neurons in the fruit fly Antennal Lobe in the recovery of the semantics
and the onset/offset timing information (or semantic timing). Our model of the
Antennal Lobe circuit is built with a highly versatile canonical model of neural
computation - the differential Divisive Normalization Processor.

Aurel
http://www.bionet.ee.columbia.edu