Guest Editorial

Perception
Twenty Shades of 2017, Vol. 46(3–4) 241–244
! The Author(s) 2017
Chemosensory Perception Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0301006617696398
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This special issue on chemosensory perception was motivated by the rapid development of
biologically focused research and new advances in neuroscience methods. These methods
have greatly advanced our understanding of the peripheral and central mechanisms
regulating processing within the chemical senses, that is, smell, taste, chemostesis
(trigeminal), and the combination thereof, flavor. However, although many new insights
have expanded our understanding of how these stimuli are perceived and processed, they
have so far had little impact on our understanding of the psychological aspects of
chemosensory perception and how chemosensory mechanisms influence perceptual
experiences and behaviors. Therefore, the systematic integration of biological mechanisms
with perceptual outcomes, and variables that moderates those relationships, is of critical
importance to the progress of the chemical senses discipline. As such, results regarding
chemosensory mechanisms obtained by molecular or neuroimaging methods need to be
complemented by an understanding of the stimulus properties that initiate these processes,
as well as their behavioral outcomes. For example, findings on odor-based activation clusters
in neuroimaging experiments, or receptor polymorphisms, are not fully informative until they
are reliably linked to an understanding of odor percepts and related behaviors. The
realization of this importance has reinvigorated research in chemosensory psychophysics,
and it has kindled a renewed interest in perceptual measurement.
This special issue in Perception, titled Chemosensory Perception, brings together 20 original
papers that display the diversity and depth of current chemosensory perception research. The
special issue is divided into three sections that together encompass a large part of the research
field, ranging from experimental studies to reviews, including a variety of methodological and
theoretical approaches.
The first section of the issue focuses on taste perception. Lipchock and colleagues
demonstrate a link between an individual’s perception of bitter taste intensity of caffeine and
taste receptor messenger RNA. When the amount of daily caffeine intake was taken into
account, a full 47% of participant’s bitterness ratings were accounted for by these genetic
and environmental parameters alone. These findings demonstrate that for taste perception,
even though the mechanism is not fully known, some of the variation is clearly linked to our
genetic makeup. The article by Lipchock et al. is followed by two articles that complement the
aforementioned genetic data while deepening our understanding of nongenetic factors in taste
perception. Doty and colleagues demonstrate that taste perception is not only dependent on
genetic polymorphisms but also on environmental and demographic variables. Using a taste
confusion paradigm, the authors demonstrate that in addition to genetically dependent factors,
parameters such as age, sex, smoking habits, and chemosensory disturbances significantly
influence the final taste percept. Determinants of taste perception are further investigated by
Shepard and colleagues who explore contextual influences that are commonly observed in
various sensory systems. Specifically, they focus on the so-called contrast effect, where in the
242 Perception 46(3–4)

presence of an intense prior stimulation, a test stimulus is often judged to be weaker than when
presented alone. However, across two experiments, results suggest that this effect is much
weaker or nonexistent for taste stimuli. The intimate link between taste perception, energy
intake, and flavor processing is explored in the contribution by Jacobson et al. Using functional
magnetic resonance imaging, they investigated how metabolic states affect the cortical
processing of a nutritional taste stimulus in young and old participants. They report age-
related differences in areas previously associated with taste and flavor processing. Critically,
these links are dependent on metabolic state, providing evidence of how bodily states affect
cortical processing of taste stimuli. In the last article of this section, Boesveldt and de Graaf
provide an integrative review of the different roles that smell and taste serve in regulating eating
behavior and metabolic processes. Their synthesis serves as a bridge to the next section, which
focuses on olfactory perception.
The second section includes articles ranging from basic odor perceptual processes to
studies exploring how cognitive factors and individual traits influence the final odor
percept. Courtiol and Wilson start the section by providing a state-of-the-art review of the
olfactory network and what is known about how its nodes interact to create the final odor
percept. Among several insights offered in their review, the olfactory network is very dynamic
and highly dependent on several neural areas that are traditionally not considered part of the
core olfactory network. The tuning of this olfactory system to behaviorally relevant odors is
subsequently explored by Sarrafchi and Laska who establish mice sensitivity thresholds to a
blood odor component. Sarrafchi and Laska suggest that both mice and humans are
extremely sensitive to this odor. Given the hypothesis that animals are in general most
sensitive toward ecologically relevant sensory stimuli, these data provide further support
for the notion that this blood odor component is a salient stimulus, for which the
olfactory system has evolved to detect in minute amounts. In line with the message of
Courtol and Wilsons’ review on the dynamic nature of the olfactory network, Poletti and
colleagues demonstrate that long-term olfactory training can significantly improve olfactory
functions in patients with olfactory loss. In line with this suggestion, Knaapila et al. provide
results suggesting that recurrent exposure to spices are associated with high olfactory
identification ability. Other determinants of odor identification ability are suggested by
Hoenen and colleagues, who report a complex association between odor identification
ability, and emotional and physiological stress.
A long-standing issue in olfactory perception is how lateralization influences olfactory
perception. Here, Manescu and coauthors provide results that suggest that the perception
of trigeminal/olfactory stimuli is affected by the participants’ stimulated nostril and their
handedness. Another interesting possible determinant of olfactory perception is the hedonic
context of prior odors. Nakano and Ayabe-Kanamura investigated the contrast effect in the
hedonic ratings of odors and pictures. Their results demonstrate that while unpleasant
pictures lead to a more positive evaluation of subsequent pleasant pictures, and pleasant
pictures similarly lead to a more negative rating of subsequent unpleasant pictures, only the
latter effect was observed when the pictures were replaced by odors. The results are consistent
with the notion of olfaction as a warning system that is tuned to chemosensory events that
might be harmful. The results are different from those reported by Shepard et al. in this issue,
who found minimal contrast effects in taste intensity ratings. Whether contrast effects are
fundamentally different for taste and smell or whether hedonic and intensity evaluations are
differently affected by context stimuli are ripe topics for further investigation. Taken together,
the studies included in this section highlight that the olfactory percept is determined by a
range of diverse influences and that olfactory abilities might change as a function of internal
states, experiences, and evolved dispositions.
Lundström et al. 243

Dissociating perception from cognition is easy in theory, but perhaps impossible in practice.
This is especially true in chemosensory perception, where cognitive modulation influences the
perceptual processing already at the first synapse (Kass, Rosenthal, Pottackal, & McGann,
2013) which changes the final subjective percept (Åhs, Miller, Gordon, & Lundström, 2013). In
the final section of this special issue, we therefore explore the roles that cognitive factors and
individual traits play in shaping olfactory experiences and abilities. Majid and colleagues
provide an overview of factors, spanning from biological to environmental, that renders an
individual a better smeller and they provide evidence to support the notion that experience and
environmental influences are of particular importance. Nordin and colleagues complement
this notion by demonstrating that individual differences in negative affectivity, a trait
regulating sensitivity to negative stimuli, are an important predictor of odor valence
perception and to what degree unpleasant odors are viewed as distracting. Their study is a
nice demonstration of the link between personality traits and odor perception. This theme is
further explored by Cecchetto and coauthors. They demonstrate that odor perception
influences moral judgments and suggest that feelings of disgust might provide a link
between these two parameters. This link needs further investigation, however, as Schienle
and Schöpf found no evidence of a link between trait disgust and odor-mediated food-
rejection responses. As past studies have found links between trait disgust and odor
perception (e.g., Liuzza, Olofsson, Sabiniewics, & Sorokowska, in press), an interesting
future question would be to assess the difference between food-rejection responses and more
basic odor processes. Novakova and colleagues investigate body odor perception during
puberty and find evidence that this developmental stage is characterized by an increasing
tendency to appreciate the smell of children over adults, and older girls more often report a
preference for the smells of men rather than women. The results indicate that during puberty,
the preference for smells associated with immediate family become less pronounced, consistent
with other findings in developmental psychology. Sobotkova and coauthors investigated a
similar topic, namely how perfumes are selected and evaluated by men and their sisters. They
report that the sisters of male participants were better than the participants themselves at
selecting perfumes that were deemed, by the participating men, as attractive when mixed
with the body odor of themselves. Both of these studies indicate that girls and women
display an orientation toward the smell of men, and a proficiency in evaluating these smells,
that is not matched by the orientations and abilities of boys and men. These results, in the
context of other results reported in this special issue, might inspire future studies to test
hypotheses derived from theories on evolutionary as well as social influences on olfaction.
Beyond cognitive factors and individual traits, chemosensory perception is affected by
factors impairing the perceptual system itself. Kollndorfer and colleagues explore whether
reduced olfactory capacities might influence individuals’ odor recognition memory and
demonstrate that established olfactory memory test scores are indeed associated with the
underlying ability to identify the odors that comprise the memory test. A practical
implication of the current findings is that olfactory abilities should be established before
administering an odor recognition test. This special issue ends with a contribution to the
ongoing debate whether individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis have
olfactory abilities that differ from those of a nonclinical population. Addo et al. were not able
to replicate some previous findings that suggested that individuals with ASD have altered
olfactory functions. Based on Bayes Factor analyses, they conclude that there are no
apparent group differences in their subjective ratings of odors. These results are an
interesting contribution to the discussion about links between ASD and olfactory
disorders, and they highlight the need for future studies with large samples and meta-
analytic approaches to conclusively settle this discussion.
244 Perception 46(3–4)

To conclude, the diversity of research topics and methodological approaches included in

this special issue in Perception provides many opportunities for the interested researcher to
become more familiar with the current trends in chemosensory perception research. We hope
that this special issue will not only inspire new research based on synergistic conclusions
drawn from these articles but also that it will lead chemosensory perception researchers in
new and fruitful directions.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Sage Publications as well as Dr. Gillian Porter for her excellent organizational
support and enthusiasm that was invaluable for the completion of this special issue. Finally, and most
importantly, we are enormously grateful to all contributing authors for providing an exciting mixture of
views and approaches. We hope that readers have as much fun reading the special issue as we had
making it.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

References
Åhs, F., Miller, S. S., Gordon, A. R., & Lundström, J. N. (2013). Aversive learning increases sensory
detection sensitivity. Biological Psychology, 92, 135–141.
Kass, M. D., Rosenthal, M. C., Pottackal, J., & McGann, J. P. (2013). Fear learning enhances neural
responses to threat-predictive sensory stimuli. Science, 342, 1389–1392.
Liuzza, M. T., Olofsson, J. K., Sabiniewics, A., & Sorokowska, A. (in press). Body odor trait disgust
sensitivity predicts perception of sweat bio-samples. Chemical Senses.

Johan N. Lundström
Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; Monell
Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA; Department of Psychology, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Artin Arshamian
Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; Donders
Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior and Center for Language Studies, Radboud
University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Department of Psychology, Stockholm University,
Stockholm, Sweden

Jonas K. Olofsson
Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; Swedish Collegium
for Advanced Study, Uppsala, Sweden