Real and Imagined Smellscapes.

Permagnus Lindborg,Kongmeng Liew

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.718172

Abstract

The smellscape is the olfactory environment as perceived and understood, consisting of odours and scents from multiple smell sources. To what extent can audiovisual information evoke the smells of a real, complex, and multimodal environment? To investigate smellscape imagination, we compared results from two studies. In the first, onsite participants (N = 15) made a sensory walk through seven locations of an open-air market. In the second, online participants (N = 53) made a virtual walk through the same locations reproduced with audio and video recordings. Responses in the form of free-form verbal annotations, ratings with semantic scales, and a ‘smell wheel’, were analysed for environmental quality, smell source type and strength, and hedonic tone. The degree of association between real and imagined smellscapes was measured through canonical correlation analysis. Hedonic tone, as expressed through frequency counts of keywords in free-form annotations was significantly associated, suggesting that smell sources might generally be correctly inferred from audiovisual information, when such imagination is required. On the other hand, onsite ratings of olfactory quality were not significantly associated with online ratings of audiovisual reproductions, when participants were not specifically asked to imagine smells. We discuss findings in the light of cross-modal association, categorisation, and memory recall of smells.

Highlights

The term ‘smellscape’ was introduced by Porteous (1985), based on Schafer’s (1977) soundscape concept
A soundwalk focuses on the acoustic environment and a smellwalk focuses on the olfactory environment
We report results using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) to compare ratings of environmental quality, and estimates of hedonic tone of the smellscape as constituted by smell sources, respectively

Summary

Introduction

The term ‘smellscape’ was introduced by Porteous (1985), based on Schafer’s (1977) soundscape concept. It refers to the olfactory environment as perceived and understood by a person influenced by memories and past experiences, specific to its context When considering living spaces and everyday environments, the quality of the olfactory environment is important both psychologically, e.g., subjective evaluation, and physiologically, e.g., stress recovery (Annerstedt et al, 2013; Hedblom et al, 2019). As olfactory perception exerts a large influence on the subjective evaluation of environments, we posit that when presented with either visual and/or auditory information, smells can be imagined to match this visual/auditory information, which would in turn exert an influence on the subjective evaluation of a particular environment

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Discussion

Conclusion