Abstract
As any food critic knows, the visual presentation of a dish can enhance its aroma. Is the reverse also true? Here we investigated whether odors can enhance the salience of familiar visual objects at the limits of perceptual discrimination, using rapid serial visual presentations (RSVP) to induce an attentional blink (AB). We had participants view RSVP streams containing photographs of odor-related objects (lemon, orange, rose, and mint) amongst non-odor related distractors. In each trial, participants inhaled a single odor, which either matched the odor-related target within the stream (congruent trials), did not match the odor-related target (incongruent trials), or was irrelevant with respect to the target. Congruent odors significantly attenuated the AB for odor-related visual targets, compared with incongruent and irrelevant odors. The findings suggest that familiar odors can render matching visual objects more salient, thereby enhancing their competitive strength at the limits of temporal attention.
Highlights
Odors are variable mixtures of molecules that bind preferentially to specialized odor receptors in the nasal epithelium
The baseline condition resulted in a typical attentional blink (AB) effect
For the critical odor conditions, typical AB effects were evident in the incongruent and irrelevant odor conditions, but the AB
Summary
Odors are variable mixtures of molecules that bind preferentially to specialized odor receptors in the nasal epithelium. From an early age we learn to associate odors with their sources in the environment (Engen, 1987; Hvastja and Zanuttini, 1989). The first-learned association between an odor and a visual object is more strongly encoded in long-term memory than subsequent odor-object pairings, and is associated with unique patterns of brain activity in the left hippocampus (Yeshurun et al, 2009). The well-learned associations between object features such as color, shape, odor, and texture provide a potential foundation for multi-sensory interactions (Walla, 2008). The binding of olfactory information with other sensory and semantic features is interesting because unlike vision, audition and touch, olfactory inputs reach the olfactory cortex without first passing through the thalamus (Smythies, 1997). The locus of any interactions between olfaction and other sensory modalities is likely to arise in higher cortical areas (Spence et al, 2001)
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