During the spring, we have had two guest interns from Università ”Magna Græcia” di Catanzaro. Arianna Spatafora and Francesca Vozzo have been assisting us in our research projects and data collection – we wouldn´t have made it without them!
We wish them the best and great fortune in whatever they do next!
The SCI-Lab is attending the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste (ISOT) in Reykavik, Iceland, on June 22-26. Five members are representing the lab. Jonas Olofsson and William Fredborg will have oral presentations in the “Working memory in the chemical senses” session, and Nira Cedres, Malina Szychowska and Samet Albayrak will have poster presentations. We are looking forward to see our colleagues in and share our latest research!
Sci-Lab is part of the Perception & Psykophysics division of Stockholm university’s Psychology Department.
As part of a visit to the University dignitaries from South African Universities visited our Division to see and try-out our lab resources.
We had a fun time demonstrating our ”toys” and we hope they had a fun time too!
Thank you for the visit!
Our article Olfactory categorization is shaped by a transmodal cortical network for evaluating perceptual predictions has been early released in JNeuroSci!
Abstract:
Creating and evaluating predictions are considered important features in sensory perception. Little is known about processing differences between the senses and their cortical substrates. Here, we tested the hypothesis that olfaction, the sense of smell, would be highly dependent on (non-olfactory) object-predictive cues and involve distinct cortical processing features. We developed a novel paradigm to compare prediction error processing across senses. Participants listened to spoken word cues (e.g. “lilac”) and determined whether target stimuli (odors or pictures) matched the word cue or not. In two behavioral experiments (total n = 113; 72 female), the disparity between congruent and incongruent response-times was exaggerated for olfactory relative to visual targets, indicating a greater dependency on predictive verbal cues to process olfactory targets. A pre-registered fMRI study (n = 30; 19 female) revealed the anterior cingulate cortex (a region central for error detection) being more activated by incongruent olfactory targets, indicating a role for olfactory predictive error processing. Additionally, both the primary olfactory and visual cortices were significantly activated for incongruent olfactory targets, suggesting olfactory prediction errors are dependent on cross-sensory processing resources, whereas visual prediction errors are not. We propose that olfaction is characterized by a strong dependency on predictive (non-olfactory) cues, and that odors are evaluated in the context of such predictions by a designated transmodal cortical network. Our results indicate differences in how predictive cues are used by different senses in rapid decision-making.
Stephen Pierzchajlo, PhD student, is the main author and with this release is the culmination of 4 years of work.
Fine the paper here: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2024/03/29/JNEUROSCI.1232-23.2024
Stephen Pierzchajlo
Petter Kallioinen successfully defended his phD thesis today!
Dr Petter Kallioinen
The defense was in Lund, were Petter has been phD-student and on Zoom.
Petter has been part of our Lab in the capacity of phD-student for some time, as Jonas Olofsson has been his co-supervisor.
Celebrations! Petter not pictured.
find his thesis here!
Anandi Hattiangadi, professor of Philosophy of Mind and Language, came and gave a great talk on LLM AI titled ”Why large language models don’t understand natural language”.
Samet Albayrak is a Turkish PHD-student, who visits SCI-LAB for a year.
Here they will bring gustation research to us and do a multisensory perception project, which consider olfaction’s and vision’s interaction on taste and flavour integration!
Samet Albayrak
Malina Szychowska, one of our postdocs in SCI-LAB, have received the news that her application ”Att navigera i det sensoriska landskapet: Hur våra sinnen formar rumsliga minnen” (”Navigating the Sensory Landscape: How Our Senses Shape Spatial Memories”) has been accepted!
The grant is for three years and for a total of 5,054,000 sek and will be used to explore sensory object´s memory, the cognitive functions and neurological representations. The project will combine Virtual Reality navigation testing and fMRI to enlighten our understanding of Human sensory navigation memory with smell, hearing and vision.
Malina Szychowska
We celebrated
Professor Simon Niedenthal was recently promoted to Professor of Interaction Design. He is a long time collaborator with our Lab and together we have developed much of our smell training and testing equipment.
In his presentation, Simon spoke about the current and past state of olfaction in interactive entertainment, such as movies and games, and the challenges of olfactory interaction.
Simon presents
Simon has been vital for the development of Nosewise (Olfactory display for VR) and Exerscent (Smell identification game for smell-training and testing).
Nosewise demonstration
Murathan Kurfali held a presentation titled Investigating the relation between Semantic Space and Olfactory Perceptions using Language Models. He was choosen to be part of the Young Investigators symposium.
”In this presentation, Murathan explored how various language models, including ChatGPT, capture olfactory-semantic relationships. Findings reveal that large language models like ChatGPT tend to resemble human imagination of odors rather than human odor perception. This research not only sheds light on the capabilities of Natural Language Processing in understanding olfaction but also highlights the potential use of AI models as valuable resources for researchers and practitioners in the field of olfaction.”
– Summary of abstract by ChatGPT-3.5
The abstract for the talk can be found here: https://coms.events/ecro2023/data/abstracts/en/abstract_0151.html
