However, despite the increase in accuracy compared to the interleaved condition, odor sampling durations remained identical between the two conditions (Figure 5C; Table 1). The improvement in accuracy on blocked

stimuli developed rapidly (within 20 trials; data not shown) and consisted of both a transient component that disappeared Quisinostat concentration when returning to interleaved conditions (about 2/3 of the total) and a long-lasting component that persisted (about 1/3) (Figure 5A; compare first and last sets of interleaved sessions). This experiment implies that the performance accuracy benefits observed in previous go-signal tasks compared to RT tasks are simply due to testing with blocked stimuli. To test this directly, the same

four subjects that were tested on the go-signal task with blocked odor pairs (Figure 4) were subsequently trained to asymptotic performance in the learn more RT paradigm also using blocked odor pairs (Figures 6A and 6B, phase IV). The stimulus difficulty was increased over consecutive days. Accuracy on the most difficult stimulus pair (12% mixture contrast) improved remarkably, from <70% on the interleaved condition to 91% ± 1% in the blocked condition (Figures 6A and 6C). We therefore introduced two successively more difficult problems: 4% and 2% mixture contrast, both obtained by using liquid dilutions of the 12% mixture stimuli (see Experimental Procedures for details). Accuracy on these stimuli, more difficult than any used previously by our group or others, was significantly above chance (Figures 6A and 6C) but was not associated with an increase in OSD (Figures 6B and 6D). Finally, we reintroduced a go signal at a fixed delay of 1 s (Figures 6A and 6B,

phase why V). The duration was fixed in order to allow optimal anticipation and subjects were trained for 5–6 sessions. Despite much longer OSD compared to the RT condition (Figures 6B and 6D) there was no significant difference in accuracy (p = 0.91, two-way ANOVA for difficulty and OSD instruction) (Figure 6E). Thus, maximal odor categorization accuracy was achieved by rats in self-paced conditions with <300 ms odor sampling time and could not be further improved by providing additional time for stimulus integration. The only impact of the go signal was to decrease performance when it was not fully anticipated, as can be seen by comparing accuracy in Figure 4B and Figure 6C (12% contrast). Studying rats performing an odor categorization task, we found that accuracy improves with stimulus sampling time only up to about 300 ms, consistent with previous studies showing rapid olfactory decisions (Karpov, 1980; Laing, 1985, 1986; Uchida and Mainen, 2003; Wesson et al., 2008). Using reward (and punishment) manipulations (Figures 1 and 2) and a response go signal (Figure 3), we were able to increase rats’ sampling time, but this failed to improve accuracy.