Abstract
Our senses have developed as an answer to the world we live in (Gibson, 1966) and so have the forms of memory that accompany them. All senses serve different purposes and do so in different ways. In vision, where orientation and object recognition are important, memory is strongly linked to identification. In olfaction, the guardian of vital functions such as breathing and food ingestion, perhaps the most important (and least noticed and researched) role of odor memory is to help us not to notice the well-known odors or flavors in our everyday surroundings, but to react immediately to the unexpected ones. At the same time it provides us with a feeling of safety when our expectancies are met. All this happens without any smelling intention or conscious knowledge of our expectations. Identification by odor naming is not involved in this and people are notoriously bad at it. Odors are usually best identified via the episodic memory of the situation in which they once occurred. Spontaneous conscious odor perception normally only occurs in situations where attention is demanded, either because the inhaled air or the food smell is particularly good or particularly bad and people search for its source or because people want to actively enjoy the healthiness and pleasantness of their surroundings or food. Odor memory is concerned with novelty detection rather than with recollection of odors. In this paper, these points are illustrated with experimental results and their consequences for doing ecologically valid odor memory research are drawn. Furthermore, suggestions for ecologically valid research on everyday odor memory and some illustrative examples are given.
Highlights
According to Gibson (1966, 1979) our senses have developed as an answer to the world we live in and their diversity can be seen as the reaction to the different challenges our world poses
Odor perception and odor memory are most of the time implicit, but for a different reason
Gibson forgot to mention that the sense of smell is watching over the foods we ingest by the retro-nasal stimulation occurring during eating. He only pays attention to the orthonasal stimulation and its function in food, mate finding, and in relation to prey/predator behavior. In doing so he adds to the conviction that identifying the odor source is the primary objective of olfaction
Summary
According to Gibson (1966, 1979) our senses have developed as an answer to the world we live in and their diversity can be seen as the reaction to the different challenges our world poses. One does not smell the odors in one’s own house, but notices the odors in the houses of friends This might mean that, at least in humans, the implicit memory of odor perception could be more related to its passive function as a warning system for the breathing or ingestion of possibly dangerous odors or foods (see the section on incidentally learned food memory below), than to the active behavior of food and mate search that Gibson described. On the basis of the foregoing, we would like to formulate what we could call“the misfit theory of spontaneous conscious odor perception” (MITSCOP), a form of “perception by exception” guided by olfactory memories via the expectations about the odors in the situation It plays, next to more semantic forms of explicit memory, a large role in incidental learning and implicit odor memory and is based on the following principles. Odors are not meant to be objectified and identified and we are so bad at it
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