Exploration of olfactory aptitude
Bulletin of the Psychonomic SocietyPublished 1 September 1986Open access
Brenda Eskenazi, William S. Cain, Karen B. Friend
Citations30
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Abstract
Forty-six subjects participated in eight relatively easy tests of olfactory discrimination and information processing: quality discrimination, recognition memory, odor-visual matching, odor-tactile matching, and various types of verbal identification. In half of 28 comparisons, performance on one test correlated significantly with that on another. The results emphasized the underlying importance of discrimination for performance in the tasks of matching and identification. The ease of the tasks produced a ceiling effect. Nevertheless, an effect of age emerged rather clearly in six of the eight tests. In four tests, a quadratic relation between performance and age proved more appropriate than a linear one. In all four cases and in composite functioning across tasks, the quadratic relation implied peak performance between the ages of 32 and 36 years.
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