On Mars 9-10, at the Department of Language Studies, Umeå University, Thomas Hörberg held a statistics workshop and a seminar presenting his work on odor and flavor vocabularies in English and other languages.
We welcome our new lab intern Chloé!
Chloé is with us on an exchange program for the spring semester. She is a master student from École Normale Supérieure and does the internship as part of the programme.
We welcome our new Lab member – David!
David will work in our sensory-memory navigation project as an in-house programmer for our Virtual Reality testing software and broaden our programming skills.
Thomas Hörberg leads an international project, trying to define and create a lexicon on odor descriptors.
When we talk about perceptions with language, we can use language with different levels of codability. This internatinal project is trying to find differences and similarities in codability of odor in different languages, and to create a lexicon of multicultural odor space.
Read the story on SU.se (Swedish)
Excerpt, translated by ChatGPT:
The researchers are collaborating with the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research and are currently collecting data on olfactory vocabulary from nearly 30 languages. In an initial phase, the researchers selected more than 400 different odors representative of various olfactory qualities. Based on this, they made a narrower selection of 60 odors. These odors, in the form of so-called scent pens, are currently being sent to 30 selected laboratories in different parts of the world, where participants will be asked to describe and rate the odors.
“The goal has been to create a selection that is as representative as possible. Some smells are strongly associated with, for example, the smell of lemon, while others may not be as strongly linked to everyday objects.”
The material will provide the researchers with a much larger range and variation of languages, as well as more reliable results, since they are now using actual odors.
“The fact that we will also map the perceptual properties of the odors makes it much easier to explore how people in different cultures experience them. You could say that we will be compiling a kind of multicultural odor space,” says Thomas Hörberg.
People from different parts of the world will contribute to compiling this odor space by providing various evaluations of the smells. Based on the odor space and the participants’ descriptions of the odors, the researchers plan to compile a cross-cultural odor lexicon that can easily be translated between different languages. The olfactory vocabularies of different languages will be able to be compared systematically. This will provide new knowledge about the interplay between language, culture, and how we perceive smells.
Happy Holidays!
We will back in the begining of January.
We were honored to welcome professor Natalie Phillips to the lab on Thursday Dec 4. Prof Phillips is a leading Canadian neuropsychologist and one of the inventors of the MOCA, a brief cognitive assessment. Prof Phillips gave a talk about the role of sensory impairments in cognitive aging.
Natalie Philips Seminar
On 21 November 2025, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, we held a symposium celebrating our former PhD student Mart Zakrzewska.
The event, titled “The Psychology of Disease,” explored how illness shapes thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and social interactions.
The programme featured talks on:
Why some individuals react strongly to everyday sensory stimulation (Linus Andersson)
The different faces of feeling sick (Julie Lasselin)
Sex differences in pathogen disgust from an evolutionary perspective (Marco Tullio Liuzza)
How olfaction relates to social attitudes and prejudice (Marta Zakrzewska)
The symposium concluded with the award ceremony of the 2024 Young Researcher in Psychology Prize.
Marta’s award symposium
The 2026 Olfactus Conference—a full day of talks and discussions led by Swedish olfactory and chemosensory researchers—will be hosted by Sci-Lab and the Division of Perception & Psychophysics.
Planning is underway, and more information will be shared as it becomes available.
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:
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
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.
