Adaptation invariant concentration discrimination in an insect olfactory system

Neural responses evoked by a stimulus reduce upon repetition. While this adaptation allows the sensory system to attend to novel cues, does information about the recurring stimulus, particularly its intensity, get compromised? We explored this issue in the locust olfactory system. We found that locusts’ innate behavioral response to odorants varied with repetition and stimulus intensity. Counterintuitively, the stimulus-intensity dependent differences became significant only after adaptation had set in. Adaptation altered responses of individual neurons in the antennal lobe (neural network downstream to insect antenna). These response variations to repetitions of the same stimulus were unpredictable and inconsistent across intensities. Although both adaptation and intensity decrements resulted in an overall reduction in spiking activities across neurons, these changes could be disentangled, and information about stimulus intensity was robustly maintained by ensemble neural responses. In sum, these results show how information about odor intensity can be preserved in an adaptation-invariant manner.