How do odorants map onto the brain and how does the brain recognize, categorize and discriminate odors? In this talk I will review current behavioral and neuroimaging approaches that address the mental and neural representation of odors in humans, in particular how we study the representation of odors as representations of dissimilarity.
On the behavioral side, we use such dissimilarity representations and interpretable artificial intelligence to uncover a putative multidimensional representation of odors. In terms of neuroimaging, we use multivariate techniques such as representational similarity analysis to identify brain areas that share behavioral and neural representations of odors.