The olfactory modality offers a unique glimpse into human affective processing due to its ability to evoke strong emotional reactions and its intrinsic overlap with the limbic  emotional system. Recently, findings from odor-based fMRI studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the roles that the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and olfactory (piriform) cortex play in the coding of emotional stimuli as well as emotional learning.

Other experiments taking advantage of the perceptual malleability of olfactory hedonic perception have helped shed light on how contextual factors modulate emotional processing in the human brain. Our research is using olfactory stimuli to understand emotional information is coded in the brain. Currently, we are developing novel paradigms to examine how cognitive control mechanisms impact coding of olfactory valence and how this ultimately interacts with taste coding in the brain.