Abstract
Both name and source information provide a context for the perceptual evaluation of odorants (Herz, J Exp Psychol 132(4): 595–606, 2003) that may also affect memory (Lyman and McDaniel, J Exp Psychol 16(4): 656–664, 1986). The current study asked whether appropriate information about the context in which an odor source is found would affect short-term memory for the odor. Fifty-four participants were presented with pairs of olfactory stimuli and visual contextual information that either matched each other or did not. There were two types of visual stimuli, either a pictorial representation of a contextual location for an odor source or a written representation of the name of that location. Stimulus presentation was followed by a verbal interference task (Peterson and Peterson, J Exp Psychol 58: 193–198, 1959). A recognition test for the olfactory stimuli conducted immediately afterwards revealed that participants who had been presented with visual representations of non-matching odor source contexts were more likely to falsely remember odors appropriate to the visual context. These findings suggest that participants either relied heavily on encoding of the visually presented source contextual information, to the detriment of memory, for olfactory stimuli or suffered from the semantic-based memory error of misattribution.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a grant from the Le Moyne Student Research Fund (N.S.) and presented in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Arts, Honors requirements at Le Moyne College. This project was presented in poster form at the XXIX Meeting of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences (AChemS) in Sarasota, FL, April 25–29, 2007. The authors would like to thank Dr. Paul Sheehe for his assistance with the design of the study and his thoughts on the results section of this paper. The authors would also like to thank International Flavors and Fragrances for providing some of the olfactory stimuli.
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Streeter, N.L., White, T.L. Incongruent Contextual Information Intrudes on Short-term Olfactory Memory. Chem. Percept. 4, 1–8 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12078-010-9082-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12078-010-9082-0