Jay Gottfried
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Can people find their way using only their sense of smell? Senses answer two basic questions: what an object is, and where it is.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
olfaction
sense of smell
odor navigation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Test whether healthy volunteers can learn the spatial positions of a set of odors in a virtual reality arena where odors are the only informative cues, and whether grid-like fMRI brain responses arise during odor navigation.
- Assess the stability of odor-based grid-like responses by changing the context of the virtual arena and testing whether olfactory cognitive maps, the brain's internal maps of space, remap.
- Probe the behavioral limits of human odor-guided navigation by progressively removing all remaining visual cues from the virtual reality arena.
More about the research
Odors can travel long distances through the air. In principle, they could tell a navigator both where an odor source is and where the navigator stands in a landscape. Odor-guided navigation has been studied in insects and birds, but research in mammals, including humans, is sparse. This project focuses on the 'where' side of human smell.
Why it matters
Loss of smell is often an early sign of Alzheimer's disease and often comes with problems in visuospatial skills and real-world navigation. By showing how the brain uses odors to orient and find paths, this work may provide smell-based frameworks that could help reorient patients to their environment. It also adds basic knowledge of how the human olfactory system locates odor sources.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jean-Paul Noel
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience·Early-career
Develop a rodent virtual-reality task in which animals use optic flow to path integrate to a hidden target, then must separate self-motion from target-motion.
Sung Soo Kim
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Identify which visual features two types of ER neurons extract in the fruit fly anterior visual pathway, using two-photon calcium imaging of tethered flies viewing stimuli in a 360-degree full-color virtual-reality arena.
Theresa Desrochers
Brown University, RI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Use fMRI in behaving macaque monkeys to identify which frontal brain areas track nonmotor, nonspatial sequences, testing whether the medial prefrontal cortex mainly encodes each item's position in the sequence.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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