Abstract
Diversity in children’s everyday olfactory environment may affect the development of their olfactory abilities and odor awareness. To test this, we collected data on olfactory abilities using the Sniffin’ Sticks and odor awareness with Children’s Olfactory Behaviors in Everyday Life Questionnaire in 153 preschool children and retested them one and a half year later. Parents completed an inventory on children’s exposure to a variety of odors and on their own odor awareness using the Odor Awareness Scale. We controlled for the effects of age and verbal fluency on the children’s performance. We found that the children’s odor identification and discrimination scores differed as a function of parental odor awareness. Although these effects were rather small, they were commensurate in size with those of gender and age. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to present evidence that diversity in children’s olfactory environment affects variation in their olfactory abilities and odor awareness. We suggest that future studies consider the long-term impact of perceptual learning out of the laboratory and its consequences for olfactory development.
Highlights
One of the best-documented phenomena in olfactory research is the great degree of interindividual variability in olfactory performance[1] and metacognition[2], referred to as “odor awareness and reactivity” or “attitudes towards the sense of smell”
Including information on parental odor awareness may help shed additional light on children’s everyday olfactory environments and how these shape the development of their olfactory abilities and odor awareness
Univariate tests showed that the effects of gender and parental odor awareness pertained to children’s odor identification and discrimination, with Cohen’s f 2 ranging between 0.04 and 0.09, indicating effects small in size, but still of “practical” significance[65]
Summary
One of the best-documented phenomena in olfactory research is the great degree of interindividual variability in olfactory performance[1] and metacognition[2], referred to as “odor awareness and reactivity” (hereafter referred to as “odor awareness” for short) or “attitudes towards the sense of smell”. The ways in which odor exposure in everyday life shapes an individual’s olfactory abilities and metacognition, i.e. odor awareness, are rather difficult to quantify, the scarcity of studies on this topic The rationale behind this line of inquiry are the effects of perceptual learning, a phenomenon whereby sensory experience brings about changes in brain function and behavior[29,30,31]. As the authors note, the sample size was quite small (N = 52) and more sensitive measures of individual odor exposure may have been needed These were used in a recent study by Martinec Nováková and Vojtušová Mrzílková[45], who showed that the degree of preschool children’s odor exposure in everyday contexts, as assessed by their parents, predicted their odor awareness, but not olfactory abilities. Including information on parental odor awareness may help shed additional light on children’s everyday olfactory environments and how these shape the development of their olfactory abilities and odor awareness
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