Odorant quality perception : A metric individual differences approach

Perceptual spaces, in which similar stimuli are located close to each other and dissimilar stimuli are located far apart, have aided in the understanding of the physiological and psychological bases for sensory quality coding. Differences in perception between individuals should be reflected by diff...

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Published inPerception & psychophysics Vol. 62; no. 5; pp. 1121 - 1129
Main Authors KURTZ, D. B, SHEEHE, P. R, KENT, P. F, WHITE, T. L, HORNUNG, D. E, WRIGHT, H. N
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01.07.2000
Subjects
Adult
Aged
Biological and medical sciences
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Individuality
Male
Middle Aged
Odorants
Olfaction Disorders - diagnosis
Olfaction Disorders - psychology
Olfaction. Taste
Perception
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychophysics
Sensory Thresholds
Smell
Human
Statistical method
Similarity
Interindividual comparison
Olfaction
Perception
Measurement method
Psychophysics
Multidimensional scaling
Odor
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Summary:Perceptual spaces, in which similar stimuli are located close to each other and dissimilar stimuli are located far apart, have aided in the understanding of the physiological and psychological bases for sensory quality coding. Differences in perception between individuals should be reflected by differences in the spatial relationships between stimuli. If the dimensionality of the perceptual space is small (e.g., color space), individual differences that reflect specific pathologies are readily apparent from visual inspection. On the other hand, if the dimensionality of the perceptual space is large (as is proposed for odor space), visual inspection alone may not reveal individual differences in quality perception. The present work presents an information-theory-based method for quantifying individual differences in quality perception from perceptual confusion matrices. The ability of this method to quantify individual differences in quality perception is shown in a hypothetical example of specific anosmia. Finally, the method is applied to the examination of intrasubject consistency of odorant quality perception.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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ISSN:0031-5117
1532-5962
DOI:10.3758/bf03212093