Chemical Senses, Vol 23, 309-326, Copyright © 1998 by Oxford University Press
WS Cain, R de Wijk, C Lulejian, F Schiet and LC See
Five studies explored identification of odors as an aspect of semantic
memory. All dealt in one way or another with the accessibility of acquired
olfactory information. The first study examined stability and showed that,
consistent with personal reports, people can fail to identify an odor one
day yet succeed another. Failure turned more commonly to success than vice
versa, and once success occurred it tended to recur. Confidence ratings
implied that subjects generally knew the quality of their answers. Even
incorrect names, though, often carried considerable information which
sometimes reflected a semantic and sometimes a perceptual source of errors.
The second study showed that profiling odors via the American Society of
Testing and Materials list of attributes, an exercise in depth of
processing, effected no increment in the identifiability/accessibility
beyond an unelaborated second attempt at retrieval. The third study showed
that subjects had only a weak ability to predict the relative
recognizability of odors they had failed to identify. Whereas the strength
of the feeling that they would 'know' an answer if offered choices did not
associate significantly with performance for odors, it did for trivia
questions. The fourth study demonstrated an association between ability to
discriminate among one set of odors and to identify another, but this
emerged only after subjects had received feedback about identity, which
essentially changed the task to one of recognition and effectively
stabilized access. The fifth study illustrated that feedback improves
performance dramatically only for odors involved with it, but that mere
retrieval leads to some improvement. The studies suggest a research agenda
that could include supplemental use of confidence judgments both
retrospectively and prospectively in the same subjects to indicate the
amount of accessible semantic information; use of second and third guesses
to examine subjects' simultaneously held hypotheses about identity; use of
category cuing or similar techniques to discover the minimum semantic
information needed to precipitate identification; some use of subjects
trained in quantitative descriptive analysis to explore whether such
training enhances semantic memory; and judicious use of mixtures to explore
perceptual versus semantic errors of identification.
ARTICLES
Odor identification: perceptual and semantic dimensions
Chemosensory Perception Laboratory, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla 92093-0957, USA. wcain@ucsd.edu
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