ODOR IDENTIFICATION - PERCEPTUAL AND SEMANTIC DIMENSIONS

Five studies explored identification of odors as an aspect of semantic memory. All dealt in one way or another with the accessibility of acq uired olfactory information. The first study examined stability and sh owed that, consistent with personal reports, people can fail to identi fy an odor one day yet succeed another. Failure turned more commonly t o success than vice versa, and once success occurred it tended to recu r. Confidence ratings implied that subjects generally knew the quality of their answers. Even incorrect names, though, often carried conside rable information which sometimes reflected a semantic and sometimes a perceptual source of errors. The second study showed that profiling o dors via the American Society of Testing and Materials list of attribu tes, an exercise in depth of processing, effected no increment in the identifiability/accessibility beyond an unelaborated second attempt at retrieval. The third study showed that subjects had only a weak abili ty to predict the relative recognizability of odors they had failed to identify. Whereas the strength of the feeling that they would 'know' an answer if offered choices did not associate significantly with perf ormance for odors, it did for trivia questions. The fourth study demon strated an association between ability to discriminate among one set o f odors and to identify another, but this emerged only after subjects had received feedback about identity, which essentially changed the ta sk to one of recognition and effectively stabilized access. The fifth study illustrated that feedback improves performance dramatically only for odors involved with it, but that mere retrieval leads to some imp rovement. The studies suggest a research agenda that could include sup plemental use of confidence judgements both retrospectively and prospe ctively in the same subjects to indicate the amount of accessible sema ntic information; use of second and third guesses to examine subjects' simultaneously held hypotheses about identity; use of category cuing or similar techniques to discover the minimum semantic information nee ded to precipitate identification; some use of subjects trained in qua ntitative descriptive analysis to explore whether such training enhanc es semantic memory; and judicious use of mixtures to explore perceptua l versus semantic errors of identification.