SCI-Lab at Neuroimaging Methods Symposium (NEMES) 2025

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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

Thomas Hörberg at ECRO 2025

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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.

Thomas Hörberg initiates global multilab collaboration on odor vocabularies

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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

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

Marie Low has accepted a PhD position

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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.

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

Jonas on BBC Start of the Week

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Jonas was interviewed about the ”underrated sense of smell” on BBC Start of the Week show, together with literary scholar Ally Louks and interaction researcher Alan Chalmers.

Listen to it here: https://www.bbc.com/

Thomas Hörberg teaches at FLAVOURsome in Dresden

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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.

 

Marie Low does Science Outreach with ”Borrow a researcher” by ForskarFredag

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What is it like being a research assistant in cognitive neuroscience? How does your brain remember the locations of smells and sounds? How does your brain help you recognize emotions expressed by other people? Marie Low will be visiting schools on April 8 to tell students about psychology research, as part of the “Borrow a Researcher” event held by ForskarFredag (“Låna en forskare”).

If you want to borrow her – or another researcher – find them here: https://forskarfredag.se/

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/