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.
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
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.
Thomas Hörberg
Malina Szychowska
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 so that technological developments may have a positive and sustainable social impact.
https://www.dn.se/debatt/utan-manniskan-blir-forskningen-bara-platt/ (Swedish)
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/
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 for more robust and reproducible research and hands-on analysis workshops.
From the presentation ”Fundamentals of network theory”, by William Hedley Thompson, Gothenburg university
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.
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 will collect comprehensive odor-perceptual and odor-descriptive data from many different languages.
For information or questions, email Thomas at: thomas.horberg[a]psychology.su.se
We congratulates Marie Low, has received and accepted a PhD-position!
She will be leaving the lab to join Tina Sundelin’s group (also at Stockholm University) in September 2025. Her phd-project will be about sleep and social behaviour.
Thomas Hörberg taught PhD students and postdocs during the FLAVOURsome Advanced Training School in Dresden on the topic of ”Linguistic analyses of flavor”. At the end of the lecture, the students got to describe the flavors of ten different food items. A flavor space, a similarity matrix of the flavors, wasthen derived from their descriptions. A truly hands on experience of how language can be used to analyse and map flavors.
