A detailed exploration of crossmodal associations with odour

Project Description

Odours play a critical role in everyday experiences including eating behaviour, relationships, and mental health. A loss of the sense of smell can therefore have devastating effects on one’s life. The goal of this project is to begin investigating the best approach for retraining the sense of smell following olfactory loss. Existing olfactory training procedures recommend smelling a small number of fixed odours daily for several months. What role other sensory modalities can play in this recovery process has not been investigated however. To begin exploring this untapped potential, in this project we have designed two experiments to meet two objectives: (1) to investigate the strength of association between odours and fine-grained perceptual dimensions across sensory modalities, and (2) to test to what extent odour crossmodal associations facilitate cognitive processing. The results of the experiments will provide a critical basis on which new olfactory training programs can be developed.