Odorant Normative Data for Use in Olfactory Memory Experiments: Dimension Selection and Analysis of Individual Differences

Moss, Andrew; Miles, Christopher; Elsley, Jane V.; Johnson, Andrew

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01267

Cited by 12 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 65 publications

(108 reference statements)

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“…The purpose of this selection was to examine PI effects for olfactory memory rather than memory for the verbal recoding of olfactory stimuli. However, it should be noted that the normative data from Moss et al (2016) reveal a strong positive correlation between verbalisability and familiarity (r = .88). It therefore follows that the negative probe odours used here possessed low familiarity ratings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…A third explanation for the absence of PI in Experiment 1 concerns the characteristics of the stimuli. Our negative probe odours were purposely selected for their low verbalisability score (using normative ratings from Moss et al, 2016). The purpose of this selection was to examine PI effects for olfactory memory rather than memory for the verbal recoding of olfactory stimuli.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Each odorant comprised 5ml of an oil-based liquid, and was stored in an opaque test tube in order to mask the odorant's colour. Twenty odours (Appendix 1) were selected as the negative probe items; these odours were purposefully pre-selected as they were previously rated as difficult to verbalise These ratings were obtained from an earlier study that collected normative data for 200 odours (Moss et al, 2016). The verbalisability rating used for stimulus selection was scored from 0-3 according to the quality of the verbal labels provided, with a lower score indicating vague or absent verbalisability.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The stimuli were as described for Experiment 1, with the crucial difference that 20 odours rated high on verbalisability (Moss et al, 2016) were selected as the negative probe odours (see Appendix 1). The verbalisability score for these odours was 0.78 SD above the mean for the stimulus set.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Experiment 1 directly tests short-term item-specific PI effects for olfactory memory using the recent probes task. We compare olfactory stimuli that have previously been shown to be difficult to label verbally (Moss, Miles, Elsley, & Johnson, 2016). Hard-to-name odours are initially employed in order to investigate memory for olfactory percepts (rather than verbal labels of those percepts).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Item-specific proactive interference in olfactory working memory

Moss

Miles

Elsley

et al. 2017

Memory

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We examine item-specific olfactory proactive interference (PI) effects and undertake comparisons with verbal and non-verbal visual stimuli. Using a sequential recent-probes task, we show no evidence for PI with hard-to-name odours (Experiment 1). However, verbalisable odours do exhibit PI effects (Experiment 2). These findings occur despite above chance performance and similar serial position functions across both tasks. Experiments 3 and 4 apply words and faces, respectively, to our modified procedure, and show that methodological differences cannot explain the null finding in Experiment 1. The extent to which odours exhibit analogous PI effects to that of other modalities is, we argue, contingent on the characteristics of the odours employed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Item-specific proactive interference in olfactory working memory

Moss

Miles

Elsley

et al. 2017

Memory

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The language of smell: Connecting linguistic and psychophysical properties of odor descriptors

et al. 2018

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The olfactory sense is a particularly challenging domain for cognitive science investigations of perception, memory, and language. Although many studies show that odors often are difficult to describe verbally, little is known about the associations between olfactory percepts and the words that describe them. Quantitative models of how odor experiences are described in natural language are therefore needed to understand how odors are perceived and communicated. In this study, we develop a computational method to characterize the olfaction-related semantic content of words in a large text corpus of internet sites in English. We introduce two new metrics: olfactory association index (OAI, how strongly a word is associated with olfaction) and olfactory specificity index (OSI, how specific a word is in its description of odors). We validate the OAI and OSI metrics using psychophysical datasets by showing that terms with high OAI have high ratings of perceived olfactory association and are used to describe highly familiar odors. In contrast, terms with high OSI have high inter-individual consistency in how they are applied to odors. Finally, we analyze Dravnieks's (1985) dataset of odor ratings in terms of OAI and OSI. This analysis reveals that terms that are used broadly (applied often but with moderate ratings) tend to be olfaction-unrelated and abstract (e.g., "heavy" or "light"; low OAI and low OSI) while descriptors that are used selectively (applied seldom but with high ratings) tend to be olfaction-related (e.g., "vanilla" or "licorice"; high OAI). Thus, OAI and OSI provide behaviorally meaningful information about olfactory language. These statistical tools are useful for future studies of olfactory perception and cognition, and might help integrate research on odor perception, neuroimaging, and corpus-based linguistic models of semantic organization.

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The smells we know and love: variation in codability and description strategy

Poulton

2020

Lang. cogn.

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The English lexicon is quite impoverished in capturing the perceptual detail of odour qualities. To make up for the lack of smell vocabulary, speakers will often resort to source-based descriptions, a strategy that likens smells to real-world reference points, like ‘mint’. This study examines the instances when Australian English speakers use particular communicative strategies, to explore whether cultural or cognitive influences allow for the easier abstraction of odour qualities. This study combines (1) an odour description task, and (2) a similarity-based sorting task. The results of (1) show that the communicative preferences for describing smells are indeed reliant on source-based descriptions, and the results of (2) show that conceptualisation of odours is primarily based on hedonic valence, and secondarily on salient scents. By combining these results, I find that the communicative preferences vary depending on the conceptualisations of a scent. Scents judged as pleasant receive relatively more abstract descriptions, like ‘sweet’, and show a higher degree of agreement, and the source-based descriptions are particularly frequent among culturally salient scents.

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Odorant Normative Data for Use in Olfactory Memory Experiments: Dimension Selection and Analysis of Individual Differences

Cited by 12 publications

References 65 publications

Item-specific proactive interference in olfactory working memory

Item-specific proactive interference in olfactory working memory

The language of smell: Connecting linguistic and psychophysical properties of odor descriptors

The smells we know and love: variation in codability and description strategy

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