Jonas wrote a piece for The Guardian’s ”The Big Idea” section about the importance of smell.
From the article:
Smell has an outsize effect on our thoughts and moods, so it’s worth paying more attention to it
Find it at the Guardian here: Looking for a better life? Follow you nose
The Forgotten Sense is a research journey through the uncharted territory of human olfaction – smell. After having been dismissed by scientists and philosophers for centuries, the human sense of smell was rarely fully recognized for its sensitivity or importance for human well-being and psychology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of us lost the smell ability we had taken for granted. The experience, which was transient for the fortunate majority, made our sense of smell more appreciated. Few know how remarkably sensitive their noses are, and just how important the sense of smell is for our brain health, our sexuality, and our political views. In The Forgotten Sense, Jonas Olofsson, Professor of Psychology at Stockholm University and Principal Investigator of the SCI-LAB, takes the reader on a tour of our most essential sense, sharing insights gained through being immersed in the research on human sense of smell for over two decades. The book can be ordered via the Mariner/HarperCollins website.
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.
The National committee for Psychology awards the best dissertation from all newly defended psychology dissertations in Sweden. This year, Marta Zakrzewska won with the dissertation ”Olfaction and prejudice: The role of body odor disgust sensitivity and disease avoidance in understanding social attitudes”. She did her PhD at the SCI-Lab with Jonas Olofsson as her main supervisor.
Her dissertation previously won the Department of Psychology’s (Stockholm university) best dissertation award. Today she works at RISE, after finishing a post doc at the Karolinska Institute.
The Committee motivation:
”Dr. Marta Zakrzewska tilldelas Nationalkommitténs pris till yngre forskare 2024 för sin imponerande och nyskapande forskning kring lukt och sociala fördomar. Med stor vetenskaplig noggrannhet och kreativ metodologisk bredd har Dr. Zakrzewska undersökt hur kroppsluktsaversion och sociala attityder samspelar inom ramen för det beteendemässiga immunsystemet. Genom att kombinera socialpsykologiska perspektiv med olfaktorisk forskning på ett unikt sätt har Dr. Zakrzewska belyst ett högaktuellt och originellt ämnesområde som både väcker nyfikenhet och har potential att intressera en bred publik.”
Marta Zakrzewska nails it! (her winning dissertation)
Murathan Kurfali has received 4.5 million sek, for the project ”Doftande AI? Integrering av lukt i stora språkmodeller” – Smelling AI? Integration of smell in Large Language Models!
Congratulations!
Murathan Kurfali
Department Days 2023, AI seminar
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 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.
Warm welcome to the new addition to our team – Marie Low!
She is our new Research Assistant to Malina Szychowska and her project on memory navigation: ”Navigating the Sensory Landscape: How Our Senses Shape Spatial Memories”
Marie just got her Masters degree in Psychology, at the Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, with the thesis titled: ”Emotion Recognition and Adult Aging: No Effect of Intranasal Oxytocin, but Sensory Modality Matters” (Supervisor: Håkan Fischer).
We’re happy to announce that our new research assistant, Frida Smids,
will join the lab. Frida will work with data collection in an ongoing study testing the effects of different sensory modalities in working memory training for older adults.
Frida has a Masters degree in Psychology from Lund’s University, titled Resting-state Functional Connectivity in Anhedonia: Exploring the Effects of Pramipexole (Supervisor Johannes Björkstrand. She is currently affiliated with Äldercentrum at the Karolinska Institute.
The SCI-Lab recently participated in the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste (ISOT) in Reykjavik, June 22-26. Jonas Olofsson and William Fredborg delivered oral presentations in the symposium ”Working Memory in the Chemical Senses”. Meanwhile, Nira Cedres, Malina Szychowska, and Samet Albayrak presented their posters, receiving much positive feedback. We were proud to share our findings on human cognition and olfaction with so many wonderful colleagues, and are grateful for the opportunity to discuss both our research and theirs with so many brilliant minds. The lab members also enjoyed Iceland’s rugged beauty, hot springs and culinary offerings (but not the fermented shark).
