The smell map: commonality of odour perception confirmed

• Published in: Clinical otolaryngology and allied sciences Vol. 29; no. 6; pp. 648 - 654
• Main Authors: Dawes, P.J.D., Dawes, M.T., Williams, S.M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.12.2004
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; multidimensional scaling; Odorants; odour rating; olfaction; Smell - physiology; Surveys and Questionnaires
• ISSN: 0307-7772; 1365-2273
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2273.2004.00873.x

We have examined the repeatability of a perceptual space, or smell map, initially developed in a sample of 20 people. A total of 110 normosmic people performed similarity ratings for pairs of the 11 commonly encountered odours used in the previous study. Multidimensional scaling was again used to analyse the relationships between odours. Some individual plots and an archetype, generated using the data from all participants, produced results similar to the previous study, confirming the ability to obtain reproducible results using a different tester and different participants. Exploration of the source space, that is, the spatial distribution of the individual plots relative to each other, suggests that the current model explains about 50% of the variation between subjects for the two-dimensional solution and 57% for the three-dimensional solution.