Unpleasant Odors Affect Alerting Attention in Young Men: An Event-Related Potential Study Using the Attention Network Test

Abstract

Attention to unpleasant odors is crucial for human safety because they may signal danger; however, whether odor concentration also plays a role remains debated. Here, we explored the effects of two concentrations of pleasant and unpleasant odors on the attention network, comprising the alerting, orienting, and executive control networks. Behavioral responses were examined using the Attention Network Test, while electrophysiological responses were examined by assessing N1 and N2 amplitudes in 30 young men. We found that irrespective of odor concentration, an unpleasant odor induced larger cue-related N1 and N2 amplitudes in the alerting and executive control networks at occipital and frontal electrode sites and that was only paralleled by a reduced behavioral response time of cue-related trails in the alerting network. Thus, our results do not provide supporting evidence for a concentration-dependent effect, but they do suggest that more attentional resources are allocated to alerting-relevant stimuli to improve behavioral response times to a potential threat in young men.

Community Health Risk Awareness and Knowledge of Air Pollution in Annadale, Polokwane Local Municipality, Limpopo Province, South Africa

“…This show that greater number of residents in Annadale consider smell from sewage to be the main cause of air pollution, this is believed to be because it is easy to smell sewer gas, as opposed to other types of pollutants in the air that may still be harmful without being smelled. 24 Motor vehicles, industries, poor waste collection and burning of waste were also amongst other causes of air pollution identified. Poor waste collection was also identified by residents amongst the causes of air pollution, this may be due to weekly collection of waste by Polokwane Local Municipality that results in waste waiting for several days before being collected creating nuisance and unpleasant smells for the households.…”

“…A self-administered questionnaire (SD1) was used to collect data from the respondents over the period of 15 February 2021 to 30 March 2021. The questionnaire was adopted from previous studies 18 , 24 where reliability for internal consistency was tested using the Cronbach’s alpha test equal to 0.87 and between 0.655 and 0.827 respectively. The questionnaires were translated from English to the most dominant local languages (Sepedi & Afrikaans) and were translated back to English to identify discrepancies.…”