ArticleChemical senses2021
Enhanced Odorant Localization Abilities in Congenitally Blind but not in Late-Blind Individuals.
Article in Chemical senses, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 13 citations in OpenAlex.
- Olfactory spatial memory: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Pooled it
- The contribution of cross-modal sensory input to reaching and grasping in blind and sighted short-tailed opossums.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Stereo olfaction underlies stable coding of head direction in blind mice.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Olfactory event-related potentials (OERPs) and trigeminal event-related potentials (TERPs) - a pilot study in Czech participants with normal sense of smell.Journal of applied biomedicine · 2023Article
- Olfaction and gustation in blindness: a state of the art of the literature.Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2023Review
- Morphometry Difference of the Hippocampal Formation Between Blind and Sighted Individuals.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Although often considered a nondominant sense for spatial perception, chemosensory perception can be used to localize the source of an event and potentially help us navigate through our environment. Would blind people who lack the dominant spatial sense-vision-develop enhanced spatial chemosensation or suffer from the lack of visual calibration on spatial chemosensory perception? To investigate this question, we tested odorant localization abilities across nostrils in blind people compared to sighted controls and if the time of vision loss onset modulates those abilities. We observed that congenitally blind individuals (10 subjects) outperformed sighted (20 subjects) and late-blind subjects (10 subjects) in a birhinal localization task using mixed olfactory-trigeminal stimuli. This advantage in congenitally blind people was selective to olfactory localization but not observed for odorant detection or identification. We, therefore, showed that congenital blindness but not blindness acquired late in life is linked to enhanced localization of chemosensory stimuli across nostrils, most probably of the trigeminal component. In addition to previous studies highlighting enhanced localization abilities in auditory and tactile modalities, our current results extend such enhanced abilities to chemosensory localization.
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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.