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/

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.

The book is in Swedish,  the title translated is ”The underrated sense – About man’s unknown ability to perceive smells”. It popularizes our understanding of, and the remarkable aspects, of the human sense of smell.

Link to Publisher: https://www.nok.se/

From the release of ”Det underskattade sinnet”

Marta Zakrzewska, who recently graduated as a PhD from the lab and is now a postdoc at Karolinska Institute, found that body odor disgust sensitivity is associated with xenophobia across the world. This pre-registered research was recently published in Royal Society Open Science.

Find ”Body odour disgust sensitivity is associated with xenophobia: evidence from nine countries across five continents” here.