It has been very controversial whether humans can do egocentric localization, that is, keep their head motionless and say where the spatial source of an odor is. It seems that we have this ability and that, with practice, you could become really good at it. |
We think that most people failed to replicate his results for that reason, that is, the extent to which they enabled natural behavior, specifically sniffing. In some studies subjects asked to localize an odor wouldn't be allowed to sniff. That's almost like studying auditory localization but having your ears plugged. We actually enabled natural behavior, we enabled subjects to sniff, and we think that's a major difference. |
While a subject was doing this task, I could look at the brain and tell you how accurate he or she would be on every trial and on the task overall. So the fact that we have this predictive value in the data really suggests that we have actually successfully captured the mechanism. |