All an animal can do to infer the state of its environment is to observe the sensory-evoked activity of its own neurons. These inferences about the presence, quality, or similarity of objects are probabilistic and inform behavioral decisions that are often made in close to real time. Neural systems employ several strategies to facilitate sensory discrimination: Biophysical mechanisms separate the neuronal response distributions in coding space, compress their variances, and combine information from sequential observations. We review how these strategies are implemented in the olfactory system of the fruit fly. The emerging principles of odor discrimination likely apply to other neural circuits of similar architecture.

中文翻译：

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感官辨别机制：果蝇嗅觉的见解。

为了推断其环境状态，动物所能做的就是观察其自身神经元的感觉诱发活动。这些关于对象的存在、质量或相似性的推断是概率性的，并为通常接近实时做出的行为决策提供信息。神经系统采用几种策略来促进感觉辨别：生物物理机制将神经元反应分布在编码空间中分离，压缩它们的方差，并结合来自顺序观察的信息。我们回顾了这些策略是如何在果蝇的嗅觉系统中实施的。气味辨别的新兴原理可能适用于类似结构的其他神经回路。