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

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

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/