New paper out: Olfactory spatial memory: a systematic review and meta-analysis

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Recently our team published a new paper titled “Olfactory spatial memory: a systematic review and meta-analysis”  in Scientific Reports. In the article, we summarized the current state of knowledge on olfactory spatial memory in humans.

Four key results emerged:

  • First, odors can be used as landmarks in the formation of neuro-cognitive maps in both sensory and cognitive brain areas, providing a foundation for spatial memory and navigation abilities.
  • Second, the human ability to memorize locations of odors, especially cues signaling high-calorie food, is indicative of its presumed evolutionary role in foraging.
  • Third, odor-recognition and odor-context-place association might stem from overlapping memory processes.
  • Fourth, olfactory targeted training enhances olfactory spatial memory and shows transfer to other modalities and cognitive domains.

To find out more, go to:

Szychowska, M., Olofsson, J.K. & Cedres, N. Olfactory spatial memory: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sci Rep 15, 38469 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-25503-5

New article published

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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

 

Dr Stephen Pierzchajlo successfully defended his thesis

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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/

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

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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 data sets, capturing either olfactory-perceptual or olfactory-semantic information.

Surprisingly, we found classic language models, such as Word2Vec, to best capture olfactory-perceptual content, and state-of-the art models, such as GPT, to excel at olfactory-semantic content. However, the results of Word2Vec depended heavily on the training data, showing much better performance when trained on olfactory-related contexts.

 

The article can be read here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/

 

Authors: Murathan Kurfalı, Pawel Herman, Stephen Pierzchajlo, Jonas Olofsson, Thomas Hörberg

New article published – Reveals sensory asymmetry in spatial memory for smells and sounds.

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Our new article, Asymmetric cross-sensory interference between spatial memories of sounds and smells revealed in a virtual reality environment was just published in Journal of experimental psychology: Learning, memory, and cognition.

We used virtual reality (VR) technology, together with the VR-compatible olfactometer developed in our lab, to study spatial memory for smells and sounds during active exploration and navigation similar to real life. We investigated whether spatial memory of odors would retroactively interfere with sounds.

Our results shows a decline in spatial memory performance over time and similar retroactive interference effects from smells and sounds. However, exploratory results indicated asymmetric effects in error trials where participants tended to misplace sounds in the vicinity of smells related to the same concepts (e.g., misplacing the sound of a coffee maker at the location of the smell of coffee). This points towards an olfactory dominance at the conceptual level.

The article can be read here: https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001493

Authors: Malina Szychowska, Karolina Ersson, and Jonas K. Olofsson

Systematic review on Olfaction and Working memory published in Chemical Senses

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A collaboration with Theresa White of Le Moyne College has been published in Chemical Senses. The systematic review A Cognitive Nose? Evaluating Working Memory Benchmarks in the Olfactory Domain sheds light on the operation of Working memory in olfaction and review research spanning the last 50 years.

Highlights:

  • 21 proposed WM benchmarks were assessed for their relevance to olfactory memory.
  • 7 benchmarks were found to apply to the sense of smell.
  • 2 benchmarks did not generalize to olfactory WM.
  • 12 benchmarks still require further research, with some showing mixed support and others unaddressed.

According to ChatGPT: ”The study suggests that olfactory memory shares many similarities with working memory in other senses, though there are distinct differences. It emphasizes the need for future research to expand WM theories beyond visual and auditory senses to better understand how our memory interacts with smells.”

Find it here: https://academic.oup.com/chemse/

New Article – Similarity judgements suggests widespread ability to imagine odors

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A new article from the Lab – Evidence from odor similarity judgments suggests a widespread ability to imagine odors – was just published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

In this study, comparisons of similarity judgments between smelled and imagined odors revealed a strong correlation, suggesting that perceptual imagery of odors is possible, with pleasantness serving as a key determinant.

Authors: Stephen Pierzchajlo, Thomas Hörberg, Sandra Challma and Jonas K. Olofsson.

The article can be found here: https://psycnet.apa.org/

New study from the Lab reveals olfactory brain networks

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In a new study, published in Human Brain Mapping, SCI-lab members Georgios Menelaou and Jonas Olofsson teamed up with researchers from Harvard University, Northwestern University and Karolinska Institute to understand how the smell brain regions are connected to deeper brain networks – the so-called Default-Mode Network (DMN) – which is thought to be responsible for concepts and meaning. The connections were measured with resting-state fMRI using a stepwise connectivity method. They found that the sense of smell was different from other senses by having a closer connective pathway to the DMN. They also found that the olfactory regions reached the DMN via two distinct pathways in the brain. The research gives insights into how the sense of smell connects to other parts of the brain in unique ways. The work was sponsored by the Swedish Research Council and the Wallenberg Foundations.

 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39688149/

New publication about the language of Wine, Food and Perfume

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Another study from the lab is published in Food Quality & Preference! On the basis of natural language in product reviews, this study compares and maps the semantic spaces of the chemosensory vocabularies of the wine, perfume and food product domains.

Thomas Hörberg and Murathan Kurfali have spearheaded this study. Find it here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2024.105357

A Rose by Another Name? – New publication from the Lab

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A new article from the Lab has been published in Cognitive Science! The article’s full title is ”A Rose by Another Name? Odor Misnaming is Associated with Linguistic Properties” and is about the work lead by Thomas Hörberg and Murathan Kurfali.

Abstract:

Naming common odors is a surprisingly difficult task: Odors are frequently misnamed. Little is known about the linguistic properties of odor misnamings. We test whether odor misnamings of old adults carry information about olfactory perception and its connection to lexical-semantic processing. We analyze the olfactory–semantic content of odor source naming failures in a large sample of older adults in Sweden (n = 2479; age 58–100 years). We investigate whether linguistic factors and semantic proximity to the target odor name predict how odors are misnamed, and how these factors relate to overall odor identification performance. We also explore the primary semantic dimensions along which misnamings are distributed. We find that odor misnamings consist of surprisingly many vague and unspecific terms, such as category names (e.g., fruit) or abstract or evaluative terms (e.g., sweet). Odor misnamings are often strongly associated with the correct name, capturing properties such as its category or other abstract features. People are also biased toward misnaming odors with high-frequency terms that are associated with olfaction or gustation. Linguistic properties of odor misnamings and their semantic proximity to the target odor name predict odor identification performance, suggesting that linguistic processing facilitates odor identification. Further, odor misnamings constitute an olfactory–semantic space that is similar to the olfactory vocabulary of English. This space is primarily differentiated along pleasantness, edibility, and concreteness dimensions. Odor naming failures thus contain plenty of information about semantic odor knowledge.

The article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70003.