Our now former PhD Candidate Stephen Pierzchajlo successfully defended his dissertation Smelling Without A Smell: How olfactory-perceptual representations are activated by words.

Abstract:

We spend every day using our senses to interact with the world. Though we use language as a way to understand the sensory world, language might have different roles for different senses. Freely identifying odors in naming tasks is more difficult than with senses like vision, making olfaction an interesting place to study the intersection between language and the senses. While free olfactory identification is poor, word cues strongly increase our ability to identify odors. This has led some to conclude that olfaction is more dependent on supporting information from other senses, and that odors are encoded in a coarse way, so it is particularly dependent on language and sensory cues to function capably. This has further led to debate regarding whether language can activate olfactory-related representations in the brain, or whether odor and language systems are disconnected. The general aim of this thesis was to investigate whether and how word cues can affect olfactory processes and representations.

You can find the dissertation here: https://su.diva-portal.org/