ArticleScientific reports2015
The scent of mixtures: rules of odour processing in ants.
Article in Scientific reports, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Context-dependent effects of formic acid on olfactory learning and generalisation in ants.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Ants act as olfactory bio-detectors of tumours in patient-derived xenograft mice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Ants detect cancer cells through volatile organic compounds.iScience · 2022Article
- Compounds without borders: A mechanism for quantifying complex odors and responses to scent-pollution in bumblebees.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Odor Stimuli: Not Just Chemical Identity.Frontiers in physiology · 2019Review
- Active explorers show low learning performance in a social insect.Current zoology · 2017Article
- Olfactory experience shapes the evaluation of odour similarity in ants: a behavioural and computational analysis.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Receptor arrays optimized for natural odor statistics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Natural odours are complex blends of numerous components. Understanding how animals perceive odour mixtures is central to multiple disciplines. Here we focused on carpenter ants, which rely on odours in various behavioural contexts. We studied overshadowing, a phenomenon that occurs when animals having learnt a binary mixture respond less to one component than to the other, and less than when this component was learnt alone. Ants were trained individually with alcohols and aldehydes varying in carbon-chain length, either as single odours or binary mixtures. They were then tested with the mixture and the components. Overshadowing resulted from the interaction between chain length and functional group: alcohols overshadowed aldehydes, and longer chain lengths overshadowed shorter ones; yet, combinations of these factors could cancel each other and suppress overshadowing. Our results show how ants treat binary olfactory mixtures and set the basis for predictive analyses of odour perception in insects.
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