Cognition and olfaction: A review.

Abstract

Examines research in cognitive psychology, which has in the past paid little attention to the olfactory modality. But there is now a significant body of literature on the role of the olfactory system in memory and cognition. Human beings possess an excellent ability to detect and discriminate odors, but they typically have great difficulty in identifying particular odorants. This results partly from the use of an improverished and idiosyncratic language to describe olfactory experiences, which are normally encoded either in a rudimentary sensory form or as part of a complex but highly specific biographical episode. Consequently, linguistic processes play only a very limited role in olfactory processing, whereas hedonic factors seem to be of considerable importance.

The human brain representation of odor identification

“…Spontaneous OI is very difficult, clearly demonstrated in the current study by the successes rate of approximately 63% for spontaneous OI in the fMRI study, and approximately 45% in the behavioral experiment. These values are comparable to previous reports where the OI success rates are between 22% and 57% in young healthy adults identifying 7-80 common odors (Cain and Krause 1979;Richardson and Zucco 1989). For the odors presented during fMRI the OI success rate was approximately 85% when using multiple choice, clearly showing the advantage of semantic support.…”

Predicting Odor Pleasantness from Odorant Structure: Pleasantness as a Reflection of the Physical World

“…This characterization of the first PC as pleasantness is in agreement with previous research (Richardson and Zucco, 1989). Pleasantness is the primary perceptual aspect humans use to discriminate odorants (Schiffman, 1974;Godinot and Sicard, 1995) or combine them into groups (Berglund et al, 1973;Schiffman et al, 1977).…”

Right-nostril advantage for discrimination of odors

“…There is also a recent report with normal subjects (Richardson & Zucco, 1989) of faster responses to odor-visual matches when the visual stimuli were presented to the left visual field than when they were presented to the right visual field, implying a righthemisphere superiority for this type of cross-modal judgment. It remains to be established whether the right-nostril advantage uncovered in the present study is limited to tasks that involve qualitative discrimination of odors, or whether it might also be found with other types of tasks, reflecting some more general aspect of olfactory function.…”