Achieving Olfactory Expertise: Training for Transfer in Odor Identification

Morquecho-Campos, Paulina; Larsson, Maria; Boesveldt, Sanne; Olofsson, Jonas

doi:10.1093/chemse/bjz007

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…For example, healthy adult humans might improve olfactory performance merely by means of repeated olfactory stimulation ( Mainland et al 2002 ), and to our knowledge, no analogous effects have been reported in the visual system. Olfactory abilities are highly trainable ( Hummel et al 2009 ; Damm et al 2014 ; Morquecho-Campos et al 2019 ). Olfactory experts (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Smell-Based Memory Training: Evidence of Olfactory Learning and Transfer to the Visual Domain

et al. 2020

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Abstract Human and non-human animal research converge to suggest that the sense of smell, olfaction, has a high level of plasticity and is intimately associated with visual-spatial orientation and memory encoding networks. We investigated whether olfactory memory training would lead to transfer to an untrained visual memory task, as well as untrained olfactory tasks. We devised a memory intervention to compare transfer effects generated by olfactory and non-olfactory (visual) memory training. Adult participants were randomly assigned to daily memory training for about 40 days with either olfactory or visual tasks, that had a similar difficulty level. Results showed that while visual training did not produce transfer to the olfactory memory task, olfactory training produced transfer to the untrained visual memory task. Olfactory training also improved participants’ performance on odor discrimination and naming tasks, such that they reached the same performance level as a high-performing group of wine professionals. Our results indicate that the olfactory system is highly responsive to training, and we speculate that the sense of smell may facilitate transfer of learning to other sensory domains. Further research is however needed in order to replicate and extend our findings.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Smell-Based Memory Training: Evidence of Olfactory Learning and Transfer to the Visual Domain

et al. 2020

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“…Imagery and non‐verbally mediated memory performance also remain specific to the domain of expertise (see Croijmans, Arshamian, Speed, & Majid, 2020; Croijmans & Majid, 2015, 2016; Croijmans, Speed, Arshamian, & Majid, 2020). At best, a limited transfer can occur but across close domains (e.g., food, see Morquecho‐Campos, Larsson, Boesveldt, & Olofsson, 2019).…”

Section: The Explanatory Benefit Of Local Spacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Categorizing Smells: A Localist Approach

Jraissati

Deroy

2021

Cognitive Science

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Humans are poorer at identifying smells and communicating about them, compared to other sensory domains. They also cannot easily organize odor sensations in a general conceptual space, where geometric distance could represent how similar or different all odors are. These two generalities are more or less accepted by psychologists, and they are often seen as connected: If there is no conceptual space for odors, then olfactory identification should indeed be poor. We propose here an important revision to this conclusion: We believe that the claim that there is no odor space is true only if by odor space, one means a conceptual space representing all possible odor sensations, in the paradigmatic sense used for instance for color. However, in a less paradigmatic sense, local conceptual spaces representing a given subset of odors do exist. Thus the absence of a global odor space does not warrant the conclusion that there is no olfactory conceptual map at all. Here we show how a localist account provides a new interpretation of experts and cross‐cultural categorization studies: Rather than being exceptions to the poor olfactory identification and communication usually seen elsewhere, experts and cross‐cultural categorization are here taken to corroborate the existence of local conceptual spaces.

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“…Second, a design where participants implicitly learn how a new label relates to odors, commonly known to represent "the muted sense" (Olofson & Gotfried, 2015), enables us to compare category formation patterns when olfactory cues are "unmuted" either with concordantly or discordantly paired linguistic cues. Third, working with a modality where stimulus identification is difficult but trainable (Fournel, Sezille, Licon, Sinding, et al 2017;Morquecho-Campos, Larsson, Boesveldt, Olofsson, 2019) helps avoid rapid ceiling effects. We can work with a modality where initial categorization performance is likely to be near chance level with gradual accuracy increases over learning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%