Fig. 3: Corticobulbar communication during retrieval of familiarity.

a The LFP was recorded simultaneously in the MOB and AON during head-fixed presentation of familiar and novel social odor stimuli (top, left). The spectrogram of the oscillation power during odor presentations showed peaks in the β and γ bands (15–30 Hz and 60–80 Hz, respectively) and sniff-locked frequencies (2–4 Hz) (top right). Odor-specific power spectrograms were normalized to baseline and averaged across sessions (n = 23 sessions from 8 mice) and show an increase in oscillatory power in the β and γ bands upon odor presentation from the familiar or novel mice (bottom). b Contrast spectrograms were computed by subtracting the session-averaged spectrogram of the response to the novel from the familiar mouse for MOB and AON, respectively. In both regions the familiar odor evokes stronger oscillations in the β and γ bands than the novel one. c Within-session comparison of time- and frequency-averaged β power increase (from baseline) confirms a stronger oscillatory response for the familiar than the novel smell in both regions (β band time-frequency window: 15–30 Hz, 0 to +1 s relative to odor onset; n = 23 sessions, two-sided paired t-test). d Single-units from the AON show more consistent phase-synchronization to the local β oscillations during presentation of the familiar animal (n = 750 units, two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test for difference between familiar and novel in averaged pairwise phase consistency (ppc)⁷⁴ in the β band). e Inter-regional phase synchronization of β oscillations between the MOB and AON increases for both odors as compared to baseline and is stronger for familiar than novel body smells (weighted phase lag index (wpli)⁷³ per session compared with two-sided Wilcoxon rank sum test, n = 23 sessions from 8 mice). In the figure, test results are indicated as exact p-values (see also Supplementary Table 4 for details on test statistics). Boxplots with a horizontal line as median, the box edges indicating the 25th to 75th percentiles, a vertical line extending to the most extreme data points excluding outliers, and outliers plotted individually as circles. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.