Abstract
The present study reports normative ratings for 200 food and non-food odors. One hundred participants rated odors across measures of verbalisability, perceived descriptive ability, context availability, pleasantness, irritability, intensity, familiarity, frequency, age of acquisition, and complexity. Analysis of the agreement between raters revealed that four dimensions, those of familiarity, intensity, pleasantness, and irritability, have the strongest utility as normative data. The ratings for the remaining dimensions exhibited reduced discriminability across the odor set and should therefore be used with caution. Indeed, these dimensions showed a larger difference between individuals in the ratings of the odors. Familiarity was shown to be related to pleasantness, and a non-linear relationship between pleasantness and intensity was observed which reflects greater intensity for odors that elicit a strong hedonic response. The suitability of these data for use in future olfactory study is considered, and effective implementation of the data for controlling stimuli is discussed.
Highlights
Cross-modal comparison between olfactory memory and memory for other sensory modalities has produced mixed findings
Further to the primary aim of providing a database of olfactory normative data, the present study aims to advance the use of normative databases in olfactory memory research in two ways
The present study provides a large-scale normative dataset, containing ratings from 10 dimensions for 200 commercially available odors
Summary
Cross-modal comparison between olfactory memory and memory for other sensory modalities has produced mixed findings. One possible interpretation of the latter finding is that olfactory memory differs qualitatively to that for other stimulus types and potentially resides within a separate olfactory-specific memory store (Andrade and Donaldson, 2007; Zelano et al, 2009). Short of an a priori assessment of name-ability, there is limited control on the psychological characteristics of the odors. These odor characteristics may be of importance in determining cross-modal serial position function congruence, since the psychological distinctiveness of items (a somewhat ill-defined construct that can be influenced by perceptual familiarity) is argued to affect both the primacy and recency components of the serial position curve (Hay et al, 2007)
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