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Verbally Induced Olfactory Illusions Are Not Caused by Visual Processing: Evidence From Early and Late Blindness

Olfactory perception is malleable and easily modulated by top-down processes such as those induced by visual and verbal information. A classic example of this is olfactory illusions where the perceived pleasantness of an odor is manipulated by the valence of a verbal label that is either visually or...

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Autores principales: Cornell Kärnekull*, Stina, Gerdfeldter, Billy, Larsson, Maria, Arshamian, Artin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8142011/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34094498
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20416695211016483
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author Cornell Kärnekull*, Stina
Gerdfeldter, Billy
Larsson, Maria
Arshamian, Artin
author_facet Cornell Kärnekull*, Stina
Gerdfeldter, Billy
Larsson, Maria
Arshamian, Artin
author_sort Cornell Kärnekull*, Stina
collection PubMed
description Olfactory perception is malleable and easily modulated by top-down processes such as those induced by visual and verbal information. A classic example of this is olfactory illusions where the perceived pleasantness of an odor is manipulated by the valence of a verbal label that is either visually or auditorily presented together with the odor. The mechanism behind this illusion is still unknown, and it is not clear if it is driven only by verbal information or if there is an interaction between language functions and visual mental imagery processes. One way to test this directly is to study early blind individuals who have little or no experience of visual information or visual mental imagery. Here, we did this by testing early blind, late blind, and sighted individuals in a classical paradigm where odors were presented with negative, neutral, and positive labels via speech. In contrast to our hypothesis—that the lack of visual imagery would render early blind individuals less susceptible to the olfactory illusion—early and late blind participants showed more amplified illusions than sighted. These findings demonstrate that the general mechanism underlying verbally induced olfactory illusions is not caused by visual processing and visual mental imagery per se.
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spelling pubmed-81420112021-06-04 Verbally Induced Olfactory Illusions Are Not Caused by Visual Processing: Evidence From Early and Late Blindness Cornell Kärnekull*, Stina Gerdfeldter, Billy Larsson, Maria Arshamian, Artin Iperception Special Issue: Our Unique Sense of Smell Olfactory perception is malleable and easily modulated by top-down processes such as those induced by visual and verbal information. A classic example of this is olfactory illusions where the perceived pleasantness of an odor is manipulated by the valence of a verbal label that is either visually or auditorily presented together with the odor. The mechanism behind this illusion is still unknown, and it is not clear if it is driven only by verbal information or if there is an interaction between language functions and visual mental imagery processes. One way to test this directly is to study early blind individuals who have little or no experience of visual information or visual mental imagery. Here, we did this by testing early blind, late blind, and sighted individuals in a classical paradigm where odors were presented with negative, neutral, and positive labels via speech. In contrast to our hypothesis—that the lack of visual imagery would render early blind individuals less susceptible to the olfactory illusion—early and late blind participants showed more amplified illusions than sighted. These findings demonstrate that the general mechanism underlying verbally induced olfactory illusions is not caused by visual processing and visual mental imagery per se. SAGE Publications 2021-05-22 /pmc/articles/PMC8142011/ /pubmed/34094498 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20416695211016483 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Creative Commons CC BY: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Special Issue: Our Unique Sense of Smell
Cornell Kärnekull*, Stina
Gerdfeldter, Billy
Larsson, Maria
Arshamian, Artin
Verbally Induced Olfactory Illusions Are Not Caused by Visual Processing: Evidence From Early and Late Blindness
title Verbally Induced Olfactory Illusions Are Not Caused by Visual Processing: Evidence From Early and Late Blindness
title_full Verbally Induced Olfactory Illusions Are Not Caused by Visual Processing: Evidence From Early and Late Blindness
title_fullStr Verbally Induced Olfactory Illusions Are Not Caused by Visual Processing: Evidence From Early and Late Blindness
title_full_unstemmed Verbally Induced Olfactory Illusions Are Not Caused by Visual Processing: Evidence From Early and Late Blindness
title_short Verbally Induced Olfactory Illusions Are Not Caused by Visual Processing: Evidence From Early and Late Blindness
title_sort verbally induced olfactory illusions are not caused by visual processing: evidence from early and late blindness
topic Special Issue: Our Unique Sense of Smell
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8142011/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34094498
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20416695211016483
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