Abstract
Hedonic ratings of odors and olfactory preferences are influenced by a number of modulating factors, such as prior experience and knowledge about an odor’s identity. The present study addresses the relationship between knowledge about an odor’s identity due to prior experience, assessed by means of a test of cued odor identification, and odor pleasantness ratings in children who exhibit ongoing olfactory learning. Ninety-one children aged 8–11 years rated the pleasantness of odors in the Sniffin’ Sticks test and, subsequently, took the odor identification test. A positive association between odor identification and pleasantness was found for two unpleasant food odors (garlic and fish): higher pleasantness ratings were exhibited by those participants who correctly identified these odors compared to those who failed to correctly identify them. However, we did not find a similar effect for any of the more pleasant odors. The results of this study suggest that pleasantness ratings of some odors may be modulated by the knowledge of their identity due to prior experience and that this relationship might be more evident in unpleasant odors.
Highlights
Preferences in adults can be described as “relatively stable evaluative judgments in the sense of liking or disliking a stimulus, or preferring it or not over other objects or stimuli” (Scherer, 2005)
To test whether association between odor identification and pleasantness ratings is limited to unpleasant odors, we aimed to classify the odors on the basis of their median pleasantness
Children who tended to correctly identify more odors than others did not exhibit any tendency toward higher ratings of pleasantness in general
Summary
Preferences in adults can be described as “relatively stable evaluative judgments in the sense of liking or disliking a stimulus, or preferring it or not over other objects or stimuli” (Scherer, 2005). Olfactory preferences have been shown to have a profound impact on human psychology and behavior in varied aspects of life such as ingestion, environmental hazards, and social interactions (Stevenson, 2010). It is, important to understand the formation of these affective responses to odors and the effects of factors that may modulate them across the lifespan (for review see Rouby et al, 2009). In a cross-cultural study by Ayabe-Kanamura et al (1998), significant differences in odor naming performance
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