Mixture discrimination training induces durable and generalizable olfactory learning independent of odorant structure and concentration
- Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Abstract
Previously, we showed that adult human olfaction retains plasticity in the unilateral processing of molecular chirality (Feng and Zhou, 2019). Using a similar unilateral discrimination protocol across three experiments with human adults (n = 96; 1,295 sessions), we now reveal distinct patterns of specificity, generalization, and persistence in olfactory learning, independent of adaptation or task difficulty. Training with binary odor mixtures at varying ratios consistently produced durable gains that transferred across nostrils and generalized to novel mixtures differing in both structure and perceptual quality. Conversely, training with odor enantiomers or concentration differences yielded neither transfer nor generalization, and concentration discrimination learning was short-lived. These results indicate that mixture configural quality is a distinct olfactory attribute from chirality or relative concentration, and that discrimination learning engages plasticity at different stages of olfactory processing depending on the task-relevant attribute. Moreover, they identify mixture discrimination training as a promising strategy for rehabilitating smell loss and cultivating olfactory expertise.
Data availability
All primary data and analysis scripts are available at: https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.psych.00845.
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Author details
Funding
Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (2021ZD0204200)
- Wen Zhou
National Natural Science Foundation of China (32430043)
- Wen Zhou
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (E4EQ5001X2)
- Wen Zhou
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Participants provided written informed consent to participate in procedures approved by the Institutional Review Board at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (H18029).
Copyright
© 2026, Chang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Mixture discrimination training induces durable and generalizable olfactory learning independent of odorant structure and concentration
eLife 15:e102999.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.102999
