ArticleScientific reports2025
Believing in simulated virtual scents produces reported olfactory sensations.
Article in Scientific reports, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Predictive processing (PP) refers to the brain's ability to incorporate present and prior sensory information about states of the body and the environment, enhancing various cognitive functions including perception, motor control, decision-making, and theory of mind. The PP framework conceptualizes the brain as a probabilistic prediction engine that continuously generates top-down predictions about the causal structure of the world. This approach has provided significant explanatory power, offering what many consider a first glimpse of a unified theory of the mind. However, olfactory perception and sensation in the context of PP remains an understudied subject. We present substantial evidence for olfactory sensations as being constructed via predictive processes. We discovered, in a pre-registered and controlled behavioral experiment, that when participant's short-term priors of olfactory sensations are manipulated by instilling a belief that olfactory stimuli have been modelled as part of a virtual reality experience, participants report diverse olfactory sensations. The results demonstrate how mind's capability of constructing reality extends from previously studied sensory modalities such as vision or taste to olfaction. The study initiates the framework for refined experimental designs on predictive olfaction utilizing virtual stimuli and potential applications for therapeutic treatments of individuals with deficiencies in olfactory functioning or neurogenerative diseases.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.