#27: Measures of Odor Discrimination in College Students — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

Instructions

Student presentations must have a faculty sponsor.

Abstracts must include a title and a description of the research, scholarship, or creative work. The description should be 150-225 words in length and constructed in a format or style appropriate for the presenter’s discipline.

The following points should be addressed within the selected format or style for the abstract:

A clear statement of the problem or question you pursued, or the scholarly goal or creative theme achieved in your work.
A brief comment about the significance or uniqueness of the work.
A clear description of the methods used to achieve the purpose or goals for the work.
A statement of the conclusions, results, outcomes, or recommendations, or if the work is still in progress, the results you expect to report at the event.

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Additional Information

More information is available at carthage.edu/celebration-scholars/. The following are members of the Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Committee who are eager to listen to ideas and answer questions:

Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
John Kirk
Nora Nickels
Andrew Pustina
James Ripley

#27: Measures of Odor Discrimination in College Students

Name: Nicole Mills
Major: Neuroscience and Psychology
Hometown: Racine
Faculty Sponsor:
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Independent research
Funding: faculty development grant

Abstract

Although it is believed that humans are proficient at discriminating between many different odors, performance is often reported to be only about 70-80% correct. Odor discrimination seems to depend upon the odor pair being discriminated. Performance may also depend upon the task, though empirical evidence is lacking.

Our goal is to collect data from 32 Carthage College students. Participants will complete three blocks of odor discrimination trials. In two blocks of trials participants will perform a standard Triangle Task (3-Alternative Forced Choice, 3-AFC), in which they will smell three odors with two being the same and one being different. The task for participants is to report which odor of the three is different. On a third block of trials, participants will perform a novel Same/Different Task (2-Alternative Forced Choice, 2-AFC) using two odorants on each trial. The task for participants is to report whether the odors are the same or different. Participants will also complete an 8-odorant ‘Scratch N’ Sniff’ identification task. The task for participants is to identify the odor from four written options. Finally, participants will be asked to rate the odors from the discrimination task on intensity, familiarity, and pleasantness, to indicate whether the odor is edible or not, and to provide a name. IRB approval has been obtained and testing is under way.

Consistent with previous research, we expect that odor discrimination will not be perfect, and that performance will depend upon odor pair. We anticipate that performance on the 2-AFC task will exceed performance on the 3-AFC task.

This study will contribute to a very limited literature on odor discrimination. Few studies have reported the effect of odor pair on odor discrimination and even fewer have compared performance across tasks.

Poster file