Presentation Details
| The natural statistics of human olfactory experience: A multi-national project Barr D.Herrnstadt1, Danielle Honigstein1, Rotem Arbetman1, Johan Lundström2, Danica Kragic3, Jonathan Williams4, Noam Sobel1. 1Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.2Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.3KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.4Max Planck Institute, Mainz, Germany |
Abstract
How many distinct odors does a typical human encounter throughout a typical day, and what are these odors? What are the sources of variance underlying this question? In this poster we will present an ambitious multi-center project (Israel-Sweden-Germany) funded by an ERC Synergy grant where we address these basic questions. We have built a cellphone app that probes the user at random times to report on their olfactory experience. Two questions: “Do you currently smell anything?” and “Were you aware of the odor before we asked?” are followed be by a series of rating scales, and an option to photograph the odor source. By probing 24,000 participants 4 times a day we will obtain nearly 1 million ratings, reflecting coverage of ~1000 ratings per minute of wake. So far, after recruiting more than 3,500 participants (out of the 24,000 planned), our data suggests that people perceive smell about 15% of their wake time. Food is by far the most perceived smell, flowed by coffee and perfume. Additionally, it seems that around 12:30 and 20:00 people are most aware of smells, a pattern that may be heavily affected by meal times. Both age and sex showed significant effects on reporting, where men reported more smelling events than women (χ²(1) = 25.32, p <.0001) and people in their 30's showed the highest smell awareness reports (χ²(3) = 81.80, p <.0001).We are in the midst of gathering data from many countries, such as Isreal, Germany, Sweden, UK, Uganda and many more to come.
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