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/

SweCog conference 2025

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This week SCI-Lab is attending the SweCog conference (7-9/10) in Lund.

https://konferens.ht.lu.se/swecog-2025/.

We will contribute 3 oral presentations, 1 poster presentation and 8 lab-members in attendance. We are looking forward to a great couple of days of interesting cognitive research and discussions!

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.

New Intern Cecilia Salzmann

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We extend our warm welcome to our latest intern Cecilia Salzmann from Zurich University!

She will be with us until June 2026, and help us with our VR and MR projects.

 

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/