Iranian Herbalists, But Not Cooks, Are Better at Naming Odors Than Laypeople

Odor naming is enhanced in communities where communication about odors is a central part of daily life (e.g., wine experts, flavorists, and some hunter-gatherer groups). In this study, we investigated how expert knowledge and daily experience affect the ability to name odors in a group of experts that has not previously been investigated in this context—Iranian herbalists; also called attars—as well as cooks and laypeople. We assessed naming accuracy and consistency for 16 herb and spice odors, collected judgments of odor perception, and evaluated participants' odor meta-awareness. Participants' responses were overall more consistent and accurate for more frequent and familiar odors. Moreover, attars were more accurate than both cooks and laypeople at naming odors, although cooks did not perform significantly better than laypeople. Attars' perceptual ratings of odors and their overall odor meta-awareness suggest they are also more attuned to odors than the other two groups. To conclude, Iranian attars—but not cooks—are better odor namers than laypeople. They also have greater meta-awareness and differential perceptual responses to odors. These findings further highlight the critical role that expertise and type of experience have on olfactory functions

Olfaction-enhanced multimedia: Perspectives and challenges

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 Springer VerlagOlfaction—or smell—is one of the last challenges which multimedia and multimodal applications have to conquer. Enhancing such applications with olfactory stimuli has the potential to create a more complex—and richer—user multimedia experience, by heightening the sense of reality and diversifying user interaction modalities. Nonetheless, olfaction-enhanced multimedia still remains a challenging research area. More recently, however, there have been initial signs of olfactory-enhanced applications in multimedia, with olfaction being used towards a variety of goals, including notification alerts, enhancing the sense of reality in immersive applications, and branding, to name but a few. However, as the goal of a multimedia application is to inform and/or entertain users, achieving quality olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications from the users’ perspective is vital to the success and continuity of these applications. Accordingly, in this paper we have focused on investigating the user perceived experience of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications, with the aim of discovering the quality evaluation factors that are important from a user’s perspective of these applications, and consequently ensure the continued advancement and success of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications

Smell's puzzling discrepancy: Gifted discrimination, yet pitiful identification

Mind &Language, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 90-114, February 2020

Not all flavor expertise is equal : The language of wine and coffee experts

People in Western cultures are poor at naming smells and flavors. However, for wine and coffee experts, describing smells and flavors is part of their daily routine. So are experts better than lay people at conveying smells and flavors in language? If smells and flavors are more easily linguistically expressed by experts, or more "codable", then experts should be better than novices at describing smells and flavors. If experts are indeed better, we can also ask how general this advantage is: do experts show higher codability only for smells and flavors they are expert in (i.e., wine experts for wine and coffee experts for coffee) or is their linguistic dexterity more general? To address these questions, wine experts, coffee experts, and novices were asked to describe the smell and flavor of wines, coffees, everyday odors, and basic tastes. The resulting descriptions were compared on a number of measures. We found expertise endows a modest advantage in smell and flavor naming. Wine experts showed more consistency in how they described wine smells and flavors than coffee experts, and novices; but coffee experts were not more consistent for coffee descriptions. Neither expert group was any more accurate at identifying everyday smells or tastes. Interestingly, both wine and coffee experts tended to use more source-based terms (e.g., vanilla) in descriptions of their own area of expertise whereas novices tended to use more evaluative terms (e.g., nice). However, the overall linguistic strategies for both groups were en par. To conclude, experts only have a limited, domain-specific advantage when communicating about smells and flavors. The ability to communicate about smells and flavors is a matter not only of perceptual training, but specific linguistic training too

Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology

The human sense of smell can accomplish astonishing feats, yet there remains a prevailing belief that olfactory language is deficient. Numerous studies with English speakers support this view: there are few terms for odors, odor talk is infrequent, and naming odors is difficult. However, this is not true across the world. Many languages have sizeable smell lexicons — smell is even grammaticalized. In addition, for some cultures smell talk is more frequent and odor naming easier. This linguistic variation is as yet unexplained but could be the result of ecological, cultural, or genetic factors or a combination thereof. Different ways of talking about smells may shape aspects of olfactory cognition too. Critically, this variation sheds new light on this important sensory modality

Olfaction As The Paradigm For Perceptual Philosophy

Plato wrote that smell is of a half-formed nature and that not much can be said about it, and Kant identified smell as the most ungrateful and most dispensable of the senses. Because contemporary philosophers share this distaste for smell perception, olfaction is often dismissed or ignored in philosophical accounts of perception. Instead, contemporary philosophy of perception is based almost exclusively on visual perception. The goal of this dissertation is to show that this focus on a single modality distorts our understanding of what perception is. I am not the first to realize the potential of opening up perceptual philosophy to the non-visual modalities. Bill Lycan asked how the philosophy of perception would be different if smell had been taken as a paradigm rather than vision. (Lycan 2000). In this dissertation, I will try to answer this question. My analysis will show that philosophy of perception would be very different, were it based on olfaction. Many of the most basic concepts of philosophy of perception are based on peculiarities of visual perception that do not generalize to other modalities

Olfaction and gustation in blindness: a state of the art of the literature

To date, there are quite a few studies assessing olfaction and gustation in blindness, with great variability in sample size, participants' age, blindness onset and smell and taste evaluation methods. Indeed, the evaluation of olfactory and gustatory performance can differ depending on several factors, including cultural differences. Therefore, here we analysed through a narrative review, all the works reporting a smell and taste assessment in blind individuals during the last 130 years, trying to summarize and address the knowledge in this field

Sensory expert assessor's learning practices at workplace : Competencies and contexts in sensory evaluation

The aim of this study was to identify competencies and learning contexts that are central when a standardized sensory expert assessor conducts food sensory evaluations in an authentic professional context. The aim was to answer the following questions: first, according to accessors, what competencies does sensory evaluation require? Second, what contexts of sensory evaluation do assessors report on? Thirteen assessors from three Finnish food companies were interviewed using semi-structured thematic interviews to map competencies and development intentions and explain established practices. In the study, 42% of analysis units described individual evaluation contexts, 53% described collaborative interactional contexts, and 5% described collaborative knowledge creation contexts. The findings contribute to the explanation of how assessors learn extensively from each other in collaborative interactional and knowledge creation contexts. Assessors' learning practices and abilities to work collaboratively in interactional and knowledge creation contexts need to be ensured for the development of expertise. Practical applicationsOur findings suggest that an important aspect of enhancing learning and achieving consistent results in assessors' work is to increase collaborative and knowledge creating practices in sensory training, in addition to training individual skills. Such practices are embedded in daily practices, especially the cases when product defects were sought and discussed. Advanced practices included: learning, sharing, and reviewing both external and in-house consumer panel feedback, developing methods to moderate small-panel evaluations and developing a product vocabulary collectively between the assessors. These practices supported sensory expert assessors in developing their personal and collective expertise in the workplace.Peer reviewe