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Chemical Senses Advance Access originally published online on August 28, 2007
Chemical Senses 2007 32(9):855-862; doi:10.1093/chemse/bjm055
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Verbal Cues Modulate Hedonic Perception of Odors in 5-Year-Old Children as well as in Adults

Moustafa Bensafi1,2, Fanny Rinck1,2, Benoist Schaal3 and Catherine Rouby1,2,4

1 Laboratoire de Neurosciences Sensorielles, Comportement et Cognition, CNRS UMR 5020, Université Claude Bernard-Lyon 1, 50 Avenue Tony Garnier, 69366 Lyon, France 2 Institut Fédératif des Neurosciences de Lyon, IFR19, CNRS, Lyon, France 3 Centre Européen des Sciences du Goût, UMR 5170, CNRS, Dijon, France 4 Flaveur, Vision, Comportement du consommateur, UMR FLAVIC, INRA, Dijon, France

Correspondence to be sent to: Moustafa Bensafi, Laboratoire Neurosciences Sensorielles, Comportement et Cognition, CNRS UMR 5020, Université Claude Bernard-Lyon 1, 50 Avenue Tony Garnier, 69366 Lyon, France. e-mail: bensafi{at}olfac.univ-lyon1.fr


  Abstract

The judgment of pleasantness/unpleasantness is the prominent reaction to the olfactory world. In human adults, the hedonic valence of odor perception is affected by various factors, among which is an individual's lexical knowledge about smells. The present study examined whether such top-down effects of lexical knowledge on hedonic judgment of olfactory input are similar in children (5–6 years) and adults (20–25 years). In both groups, the lexical knowledge was found to influence the perception of the least emotional (or most neutral) odors: the pleasantness of the smells of banana and mint was enhanced when participants were given the corresponding odor label before olfactory sensation. These results lend support to the notion that, during childhood, smells are not only encoded perceptually but that verbal encoding also steers contextual effects that may be prominent factors in the early memorization and categorization of odors.

Key words: children, emotion, hedonic processing, language, olfaction

Accepted 24 July 2007


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