Memory in the lower senses
Memory in the lower senses
By Per Møller, Department of Food Science, Sensory Systems, Life Science Faculty, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Ιntrospection suggests that we can remember stimuli and events in the lower “lower” senses (all but vision and audition). Whether these memories are genuinely “sensory” or whether they are rather of a verbal nature is not so obvious.
In the presentation I will present recent data that show that genuine sensory olfactory memory systems do exist and I will argue that olfactory (and taste and flavour) memories have different properties than visual and verbal memory.
Incidental learning, as opposed to intentional learning, is rather the rule for lower sense memories and the distinction turns out to be important for the properties of lower sense memory.
I will review results which show that (non-semantic) incidentally learned stimuli are remembered as well by elderly people as by young. This is in sharp contrast to most explicit visual and verbal memory results and resembles what is often found for implicit memory.
These results might suggest why food preferences seem to be rather constant with age, despite dramatic changes in the perception of smell and flavour with age and further, that memory might play a much more dynamic role for perception and appreciation in the lower senses, than it does in vision and audition.
Smelling is much less constrained than a spatio-temporally varying visual stimulus and memories and expectations might therefore play a relatively larger role for olfactory perception than for, e.g., visual perception.
I will present a number of results which strongly suggest that vision and olfaction have different functional structures. We have demonstrated a double dissociation between memory and discrimination for vision and olfaction.
Even though subjects discriminate better between a set of visual stimuli than between a set of olfactory stimuli, they remember them less well than they remember the olfactory stimuli. Furthermore, memories in the lower senses seem to rely much more on correct rejections than on hits:
You remember what you have not encountered previously! “Novelty detection”, thus, seems to be particularly important in the lower senses, which makes ecological sense, since the lower senses serve as protective systems with only a very limited behavioral repertoire: inhale or don’t.
Finally, I will present recent data which suggest that there is also a “working memory” system in human olfaction.
©Typologos.com 2011
