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Odor discrimination is immune to the effects of verbal labels

For many odors that we encounter in daily life, we perceive their qualities without being able to specifically identify their sources—an experience termed the “tip-of-the-nose” phenomenon. Does learning an odor’s identity alter our experience of it? Past work has shown that labeling odors can alter...

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Autores principales: Cormiea, Sarah, Fischer, Jason
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9889793/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36720925
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-28134-w
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author Cormiea, Sarah
Fischer, Jason
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Fischer, Jason
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description For many odors that we encounter in daily life, we perceive their qualities without being able to specifically identify their sources—an experience termed the “tip-of-the-nose” phenomenon. Does learning an odor’s identity alter our experience of it? Past work has shown that labeling odors can alter how we describe and react to them, but it remains an open question whether such changes extend to the level of perception, making an odor actually smell different. Here, in a set of odor classification experiments we tested whether attaching labels to odors can alter their perceptual discriminability. We found that even for odors whose reported similarity changed markedly when their identities were revealed, their discriminability remained unchanged by labels. Our findings indicate that two critical functions of olfaction—parsing the odor environment and supporting the subjective experience of odor qualities—access distinct odor representations within the olfactory processing stream.
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spelling pubmed-98897932023-02-02 Odor discrimination is immune to the effects of verbal labels Cormiea, Sarah Fischer, Jason Sci Rep Article For many odors that we encounter in daily life, we perceive their qualities without being able to specifically identify their sources—an experience termed the “tip-of-the-nose” phenomenon. Does learning an odor’s identity alter our experience of it? Past work has shown that labeling odors can alter how we describe and react to them, but it remains an open question whether such changes extend to the level of perception, making an odor actually smell different. Here, in a set of odor classification experiments we tested whether attaching labels to odors can alter their perceptual discriminability. We found that even for odors whose reported similarity changed markedly when their identities were revealed, their discriminability remained unchanged by labels. Our findings indicate that two critical functions of olfaction—parsing the odor environment and supporting the subjective experience of odor qualities—access distinct odor representations within the olfactory processing stream. Nature Publishing Group UK 2023-01-31 /pmc/articles/PMC9889793/ /pubmed/36720925 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-28134-w Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Cormiea, Sarah
Fischer, Jason
Odor discrimination is immune to the effects of verbal labels
title Odor discrimination is immune to the effects of verbal labels
title_full Odor discrimination is immune to the effects of verbal labels
title_fullStr Odor discrimination is immune to the effects of verbal labels
title_full_unstemmed Odor discrimination is immune to the effects of verbal labels
title_short Odor discrimination is immune to the effects of verbal labels
title_sort odor discrimination is immune to the effects of verbal labels
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9889793/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36720925
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-28134-w
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