Olfactory Cues Used for Wayfinding in Urban Environments by Individuals with Visual Impairments

Koutsoklenis, Athanasios; Papadopoulos, Konstantinos

doi:10.1177/0145482x1110501015

Cited by 51 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Instead, there are only reports that humans can track odors [7] and that the visually impaired use odors to recognize locations [44]. Until now there has been no empirical evidence that humans can map an arbitrary location using only odors, an ability we have established in the present study.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 63%

Olfactory Orientation and Navigation in Humans

et al. 2015

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Although predicted by theory, there is no direct evidence that an animal can define an arbitrary location in space as a coordinate location on an odor grid. Here we show that humans can do so. Using a spatial match-to-sample procedure, humans were led to a random location within a room diffused with two odors. After brief sampling and spatial disorientation, they had to return to this location. Over three conditions, participants had access to different sensory stimuli: olfactory only, visual only, and a final control condition with no olfactory, visual, or auditory stimuli. Humans located the target with higher accuracy in the olfaction-only condition than in the control condition and showed higher accuracy than chance. Thus a mechanism long proposed for the homing pigeon, the ability to define a location on a map constructed from chemical stimuli, may also be a navigational mechanism used by humans.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 63%

Olfactory Orientation and Navigation in Humans

et al. 2015

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“…Participants became better with practice and it could even be demonstrated that there is spatial discrimination of scent locations due to the (minimally) spatially separated nostrils (for the latter finding, see also Porter, Anand, Johnson, Khan, & Sobel, 2005). Olfactory landmarks have also been addressed in studies on how visually impaired people find their way in everyday life (e.g., Koutsoklenis & Papadopoulos, 2011).…”

Section: Olfactory Cues In Landmark-based Wayfindingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Odors Can Serve as Landmarks in Human Wayfinding

Hamburger

Knauff

2019

Cognitive Science

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Scientists have shown that many non‐human animals such as ants, dogs, or rats are very good at using smells to find their way through their environments. But are humans also capable of navigating through their environment based on olfactory cues? There is not much research on this topic, a gap that the present research seeks to bridge. We here provide one of the first empirical studies investigating the possibility of using olfactory cues as landmarks in human wayfinding. Forty subjects participated in a piloting study to determine the olfactory material for the main experiment. Then, 24 subjects completed a wayfinding experiment with 12 odors as orientation cues. Our results are astonishing: Participants were rather good at what we call “odor‐based wayfinding.” This indicates that the ability of humans to use olfactory cues for navigation is often underestimated. We discuss two different cognitive explanations and rule out the idea that our results are just an instance of sequential learning. Rather, we argue that humans can enrich their cognitive map of the environment with olfactory landmarks and may use them for wayfinding.

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“…Koutsoklenis and Papadopoulos () state that the role of olfaction during way‐finding relates to the direction of the wind, the stability of the odors to which one is attuned, and other distracting smells in the environment. They state that “smells also come from natural elements (the ground, sea, and trees, for example), from animals (such as horses), and from other objects or attributes that produce distinctive smells (like a garbage can or a sewer)” (Koutsoklenis & Papadopoulos, , p. 699). On the contrary, the İzmir Fair Park cannot provide any of these sensory inputs to the participants in terms of smell and air movement.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This environment offers a homogeneous smell of a green environment and there were no other sources of smell. Koutsoklenis and Papadopoulos (2011) state that the role of olfaction during way-finding relates to the direction of the wind, the stability of the odors to which one is attuned, and other distracting smells in the environment. They state that "smells also come from natural elements (the ground, sea, and trees, for example), from animals (such as horses), and from other objects or attributes that produce distinctive smells (like a garbage can or a sewer)" (Koutsoklenis & Papadopoulos, 2011, p. 699).…”

Section: Findingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Way‐finding strategies of blind persons in urban scale

Kan-Kilic

Doğan

2017

PsyCh Journal

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The aim of this study was to determine whether urban environments with different prominent sensory inputs have an impact on the way-finding strategies of blind people and to identify these impacts, where applicable. We specifically investigated how blind people use their senses to compensate for the lack of visual information and how the priority of senses changes according to the urban context. The participants of the study consisted of nine congenitally blind individuals and the study took place in two urban settings: a dense urban district, Kemeralti district in İzmir; and an urban park, the İzmir Fair Park. During the learning phase, a first trial along the selected routes was conducted for each participant individually along with one of the researchers. In the test phase, the participants were requested to re-walk the route and verbally report the environmental cues they attended to. The participants' verbal reports were recorded and transcripts of the recordings were coded according to the environmental sensory inputs. In addition, the short-term memory of each participant was also evaluated. The results show that the characteristics of the urban environment seem to have an impact on way-finding strategies of blind individuals. It was found that the sound of the city and the echo from the environment are the most important factors for blind participants in the dense urban environment. Environmental boundaries provided echoes and gave a sense of enclosure that helped them orient themselves, whereas, in the park environment, the sense of enclosure was not enhanced due to a lack of boundaries in the environment.

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Olfactory Cues Used for Wayfinding in Urban Environments by Individuals with Visual Impairments

Cited by 51 publications

References 13 publications

Olfactory Orientation and Navigation in Humans

Olfactory Orientation and Navigation in Humans

Odors Can Serve as Landmarks in Human Wayfinding

Way‐finding strategies of blind persons in urban scale

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