The Perception Neuroscience group conducts basic research aimed toward a better understanding of the neural and behavioral function of the olfactory system, and how it interacts with the other senses to interpret our environment in health and disease.
Johan Lundström receives ERC Synergy Grant to develop digital scent transmission
Kan parfymer påverka hur man upplevs av andra? – hör forskaren Artin Arshamian om dofter
Bursts of brain rhythms with “beta” frequencies control where and when neurons in the cortex process sensory information and plan responses. Studying these bursts would improve understanding of cognition and clinical disorders, researchers argue in a new review.
Olfaction is to a large degree studied from the sensory processing perspective. Here we instead study the behavioral and neural implications of olfactory cognition. Using neural imaging and behavioral studies we will establish the limits of human olfactory cognition and the underlying neural mechanisms. How do we keep olfactory percepts temporarily in mind, and are we able reshape these percepts to aid behavior? Do we have similar attentional and top-down processing abilities in olfaction as in other sensory modalities? Are analogous brain areas involved in the cognitive processing of olfactory stimuli as in the more investigated visual cognition?
The olfactory bulb is where Parkinson’s Disease starts in the brain. Based on our new method to measure signal from the olfactory bulb, we are currently assessing whether the measure can be used as an early detector of Parkinson’s Disease onset. If successful, this would mean that we most probably can detect Parkinson’s Disease many years before the onset of the characteristic motor symptoms that is so characteristic for the disease. We are also currently exploring whether we can reverse the measure to stimulate the olfactory bulb and potentially slow the spread of the disease.
We recently demonstrated a new method to measure signals from the human olfactory bulb, an area of the human brain that that was not accessible without resorting to intracranial recordings. We are in this project, under the leadership of Dr. Johan Lundström, assessing what role the olfactory bulb has in human odor perception and action. Moreover, we are also assessing whether this measure might serve as an early indicator of Parkinson’s disease.
Respiration is one of the fundamental rhythms of life, with its effects stretching far beyond basic oxygenation. Recent studies have demonstrated that breathing modulates how we process basic perceptual stimuli and tentative evidence also indicate that breathing might regulate cognitive processes. In this project under the leadership of Dr. Artin Arshamian, we are assessing how this rhythmic activity, repeated 9-24 times each minute, shapes basic perception and cognition and what neural mechanisms allow this integration between breathing and perception/cognition.
Outside the confined environment of the laboratory, smells are very rarely experienced by themselves, without the contextual information provided by our other senses. This project, under the leadership of Dr. Johan Lundström, is concerned with two fundamental perceptual neuroscience question: how is congruent information from our other sensory modalities influencing the processing of odors and what role does the olfactory cortex, if any, have in this?
The sense of smell is a sensory system that is characterized by both large inter- as well as intra- individual differences. The sense of smell is also very plastic where sensitivity towards individual odors can shift either rapidly or over time. Under the leadership of Dr. Lundström, the general aim of this project is to understand what the neural mechanisms, and their behavioral consequences, are that allow the sense of smell to adapt so fast to our environment. In doing this, we assess behavioral and neural measures in both healthy individuals as well as clinical populations with various etiology.
In this project we study the primate ability to generalize. Working memory refers to our ability to temporarily hold a limited set of information in a particular online state that allows us to access and manipulate this information. Importantly, these abilities generalize to any information and not just information we previously trained to perform such manipulations on. We test the novel theory that these abilities, along with many other aspects of generalization, builds on utilizing the spatial structure of cortex. To test this we study spatiotemporal dynamics of brain activity, including brain oscillations and travelling waves. We also perform network simulations where we explore the computational power of this theory.
Karolinska Institute, Clinical Neuroscience / Division of Psychology, Nobels väg 9, Stockholm, 17177, Sweden
Karolinska Institutet, Department of Clinical Neuroscience/Division of Psychology, Nobels väg 9, Stockholm, 17177, Sverige
Grigorios Iakovidis, Research engineer
Arnika Pehl, Master’s student
Jonatan Nordmark, Postdoc
Anna-Laura Toth, Research assistant
Moa Peter, PhD student
Johannes Frasnelli, Guest professor
Laura Dukek, Master’s student
Marie Michaels, Master’s student
Behzad Iravani, PhD student
Putu Agus Khorisantono, Postdoc
Andri Savva, PhD Student
Janina Seubert, Senior Researcher
Kathi Prenner, Master’s Student
Andreas Westerdahl, Lab manager
Danja Porada, PhD student
Robin Fondberg, PhD student
Amy Gordon, PhD student
Cécilia Tremblay, PhD student
Milena Di Chira, Master’s Student
Christina Rossi, Master’s Student
Georgia Sarolidou, PhD student
Caitlin Hrysanidis, Master’s Student
Ida Siemens Lorenzen, Master’s Student
Daphnée Poupon, Master’s Student
Alessandro Davoli, Bachelor’s Student
Riccardo Bertaccini, Bachelor’s Student
Christina Schmitter, Bachelor’s Student
Alberto Frigieri, Bachelor’s Student
Barbara Feytl, Master’s Student
Harald Melin, Research assistant
Emilia Johansson, Research engineer
Belinda Miggitsch, Master’s Student
Mirella Engelhardt, Master’s Student
Sissie Carlsen, Master’s Student
Sidney Lind, Internship Student
Anna Belska, Visiting Student
Saskia Borg, Visiting Student
The Embodied Perception and Cognition Group studies the olfactory system at the intersection of psychology, culture, neuroscience, and medicine. By leveraging the distinctive features of the sense of smell, we gain insights into how our embodied experiences influence perception and cognition.
The Computational Cognition Group is interested in the neural mechanisms underlying cognition. We study how neural dynamics support abilities such as temporarily keeping things in mind, planning or prioritizing sensory information. We have a theory-based approach where we deploy neural network simulations to build predictions that we then test in experimental data from human and animal models.