ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Perceptual convergence of multi-component mixtures in olfaction implies an olfactory white.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed, 144 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Pyrfume: A window to the world's olfactory data.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Taste shaped the use of botanical drugs.eLife · 2024Article
- Olfactory abstraction: a communicative and metacognitive account.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Why human olfaction should not be modeled on theories and tasks of vision.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- Utilisation of QSPR ODT modelling and odour vector modelling to predict Cannabis sativa odour.PloS one · 2023Article
- Effects of flavour variety on the intake and palatability of commercial feed in nursery pigs.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2023Article
- Biological constraints on configural odour mixture perception.The Journal of experimental biology · 2022Article
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- A New Classification of Perceptual Interactions between Odorants to Interpret Complex Aroma Systems. Application to Model Wine Aroma.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- A dataset on odor intensity and odor pleasantness of 222 binary mixtures of 72 key food odorants rated by a sensory panel of 30 trained assessors.Data in brief · 2021Article
- A physicochemical model of odor sampling.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Fleeting Beauty-The World of Plant Fragrances and Their Application.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Individual variability of olfactory fMRI in normosmia and olfactory dysfunction.European archives of oto-rhino-laryngology : official journal of the European Federation of Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Societies (EUFOS) : affiliated with the German Society for Oto-Rhino-Laryngology - Head and Neck Surgery · 2021Article
- Parsing Sage and Rosemary in Time: The Machine Learning Race to Crack Olfactory Perception.Chemical senses · 2021Article
- Feasibility of integrating canine olfaction with chemical and microbial profiling of urine to detect lethal prostate cancer.PloS one · 2021Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In vision, two mixtures, each containing an independent set of many different wavelengths, may produce a common color percept termed "white." In audition, two mixtures, each containing an independent set of many different frequencies, may produce a common perceptual hum termed "white noise." Visual and auditory whites emerge upon two conditions: when the mixture components span stimulus space, and when they are of equal intensity. We hypothesized that if we apply these same conditions to odorant mixtures, "whiteness" may emerge in olfaction as well. We selected 86 molecules that span olfactory stimulus space and individually diluted them to a point of about equal intensity. We then prepared various odorant mixtures, each containing various numbers of molecular components, and asked human participants to rate the perceptual similarity of such mixture pairs. We found that as we increased the number of nonoverlapping, equal-intensity components in odorant mixtures, the mixtures became more similar to each other, despite not having a single component in common. With ~30 components, most mixtures smelled alike. After participants were acquainted with a novel, arbitrarily named mixture of ~30 equal-intensity components, they later applied this name more readily to other novel mixtures of ~30 equal-intensity components spanning stimulus space, but not to mixtures containing fewer components or to mixtures that did not span stimulus space. We conclude that a common olfactory percept, "olfactory white," is associated with mixtures of ~30 or more equal-intensity components that span stimulus space, implying that olfactory representations are of features of molecules rather than of molecular identity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.