Reading first or smelling first? Effects of presentation order on odor identification

Abstract

Verbal labels are potent manipulators for olfactory perception, and verbal descriptors used in a cued olfactory identification test will influence the testing results. The main aim of the present study was to test whether the order of presentation of the odorants and the corresponding set of labels (verbal descriptors with or without pictures) would influence the results of a psychophysical odor identification test in 100 normosmic subjects (49 women and 51 men) and 100 patients with olfactory dysfunction (61 women and 39 men). Additionally, we investigated whether the scores would be different between subjects identifying odors from a list of verbal descriptors and subjects using both pictures and verbal descriptors. The subjects were examined with the extended, 32-item “Sniffin’ Sticks” identification test. We found that the scores of normosmic subjects were significantly higher when the subjects were presented with label options prior to smelling, whereas for patients the scores in the two conditions did not differ. Moreover, in both groups the scores were not significantly different when the subjects were presented either with verbal descriptors only or with verbal descriptors and pictures. Our findings seem to be of importance not only to research involving psychophysical olfactory identification tests or in a clinical context, but also to further experiments investigating human olfaction and cognition.

Brain volume changes in hyposmic patients before and after olfactory training

“…For discrimination, a nonfitting suprathreshold odorant was identified in a 3AFC procedure. The participant's task for identification was to label 16 suprathreshold odors, each from a list of four descriptors, presented as both pictures and words . Overall results were combined to TDI score.…”

“…The participant's task for identification was to label 16 suprathreshold odors, each from a list of four descriptors, presented as both pictures and words. 15,16 Overall results were combined to TDI score. Whereas control subjects were only measured once, hyposmic participants were measured before and after 12 weeks of OT.…”

Position paper on olfactory dysfunction

“…However, this test does not utilize episodic or semantic memory (193) and therefore has a lower cognitive burden. ted odour identification is difficult (194) , hence most psychophysical tests incorporate either visual or written cues (195) . Unlike odour threshold, performance in the suprathreshold tasks of discrimination and identification correlate significantly with a subject's executive function and semantic memory (193) .…”

Rapid Assessment of Olfactory Sensitivity Using the “Sniffin’ Sticks”

“…The reliability in olfactory testing is generally rather low, possibly because of the susceptibility of our olfactory sense to many external factors. These include smoking (Hayes and Jinks 2012), modality of odor presentation (Sorokowska et al 2015), hunger state (Albrecht et al 2009;Ramaekers et al 2016), menstrual cycle (Derntl et al 2013;McNeil et al 2013), climate (Katotomichelakis et al 2007), and altered state of the nasal epithelium trough virus susceptibility according to the season (Konstantinidis et al 2006). We here attempted to counteract those influences by controlling for several confounding factors (smoking, season, cycle phase, hunger).…”