Ovarian hormones modulate women’s physical and psychological states periodically. Although the olfactory function is increasingly recognized as a reflection of physical and mental health conditions in the clinic, the role of olfaction in emotional and cognitive functions for healthy individuals has yet to be elucidated, especially when taking the menstrual cycle into account. We carried out a comprehensive investigation to explore whether the menstrual cycle could modulate women’s olfactory function and whether healthy women’s emotional symptoms and behavioral impulsivity could be characterized by their olfactory abilities at a specific menstrual cycle stage. Twenty-nine healthy young women were evaluated repeatedly using a standard olfactory test battery during the late follicular and mid-luteal phases. Their emotional symptoms and behavioral impulsivity were separately quantified via psychometric scales and a stop-signal task. We observed enhanced olfactory discrimination performance during the mid-luteal phase than the late follicular phase. We also found that women’s better olfactory discrimination and worse olfactory threshold in the mid-luteal phase predicted fewer individual emotional symptoms and lower behavioral impulsivity, respectively. These relationships were nonetheless absent in the late follicular phase. Our data extend previous clinical observations of the coexistence of olfactory deficits and neuropsychiatric disorders, providing new insights into the significance of olfaction and ovarian hormones for emotional and cognitive functions.

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It has been shown that learned temporal information can be exploited to help facilitate the target identification in the attentional blink task. Here, we tested whether similar exploitation also worked on short-term temporal information, even when it did not reliably predict the target onset. In two experiments, we randomly manipulated either the interval between targets (T1 and T2; Experiment 1) or the temporal regularity of stimulus presentation (Experiment 2) in each trial. The results revealed evidence of effects of immediate temporal experience mainly on T2 performances but also occasionally on T1 performances. In general, the accuracy of T2 was enhanced when a longer inter-target interval was explicitly processed in the preceding trial (Experiment 1) or the temporal regularity, regardless of being explicitly or implicitly processed, was present in the stimulus stream, especially after T1 (Experiment 2). These results suggest that, under high temporal uncertainty, both interval and rhythmic cues can still be exploited to regulate the allocation of processing resources, thus, modulating the target identification in the attentional blink task, consistent with the view of flexible attentional allocation, and further highlighting the importance of the interplay between temporal processing and attentional control in the conscious visual perception.