Inlägg av SCI-lab-admin

New Research Assistant

Billy joins us, working as a research assistant to help with running Thomas Hörberg’s project: ”Building a cross-cultural semantic framework for odor vocabularies.” Billy has a PhD in psychology from Stockholm University, on the neural correlates of consciousness in hearing, using EEG.

New article published

A new paper from the lab has been published in Chemical Senses today. Free odor identification engages domain-general cognitive abilities in old adults, by Thomas Hörberg, Rohan Raj and Jonas Olofsson (et. al.) and investigates odor identification and cognitive aging. Find it here: https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/bjaf049  

Two new grants awarded from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Today Riksbankens Jubileumsfond released accepted applications for their project grants. Both Malina Szychowska’s and Thomas Hörberg’s applications were accepted and will receive funding for the next three years. Malina Szychowska for the project: Sensory competition in spatial memory. Thomas Hörberg for the project: Building a cross-cultural semantic framework for odor vocabularies.

Opinion Piece in Dagens Nyheter

On Sunday, Jonas Olofsson and Håkan Fischer, professors of Psychology at Stockholm University, published an opinion article in the leading Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. They warn about the risks of the one-sided focus on natural sciences, technology and medicine in the Swedish government research strategy. They recommend harnessing insights from psychology, social sciences and humanities […]

Dr Stephen Pierzchajlo successfully defended his thesis

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. […]

SweCog conference 2025

This week SCI-Lab is attending the SweCog conference (7-9/10) in Lund. https://konferens.ht.lu.se/swecog-2025/. We will contribute 3 oral presentations, 1 poster presentation and 8 lab-members in attendance. We are looking forward to a great couple of days of interesting cognitive research and discussions!

SCI-Lab at Neuroimaging Methods Symposium (NEMES) 2025

The first Neuroimaging Methods Symposium (NEMES) is an event aiming to establish a network of neuroimaging experts across Swedish institutions. SCI-Lab made our presence with Malina Szychowska, William Fredborg and Teodor Jernsäther in attendance. The symposium featured talks from experts, neuroimaging workshops and focused discussions – with the collective aim to address key challenges, means […]

Thomas Hörberg at ECRO 2025

The European Chemoreception Research Organization (ECRO)’s yearly conference was in Bilbao, between the 15th – 18th September. Thomas Hörberg presented Evaluating language models potential for capturing odor-perceptual and odor-semantic information” at the ”AI in the Olfactory Science” symposium. He also presented a poster on Odor naming as a tool for cognitive assessment.

Thomas Hörberg initiates global multilab collaboration on odor vocabularies

Within the scope of the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research (GCCR), Thomas Hörberg initiates a multilab research collaboration, encompassing over 30 laboratories in five different continents. The aim of the project is to investigate linguistic diversity in odor language and to build a cross-linguistic odor lexicon. Towards this aim, the laboratories involved in the project […]

New article published – testing the ability of language models to capture olfactory information.

In our most recent publication, Representations of smells: The next frontier for language models?, published in Cognition, we tested  language models’ ability to capture olfactory-perceptual and olfactory semantic information.   We trained three generations of language models, using around 200 training configurations and four different text corpora. We then evaluated these models against three different […]