Relating early olfactory processing with behavior: a perspective

A fundamental goal in sensory neuroscience is to understand the rules that govern how neural activity evoked by a stimulus drives the final behavioral outcome. Here, focusing primarily on the insect olfactory system and its first two anatomical stages: olfactory sensory neurons in the insect antenna and their postsynaptic targets in the antennal lobe, we review the current understanding of the relationships between odor-evoked neural activity and behavior. The compiled evidences suggest that these olfactory circuits closer to the sensory periphery may already represent sensory information in a format that is easily translatable to behavior.