Olfaction (smell)

 

• A bin contains 100 scratch-and-sniff patches, each with a different familiar odor (e.g., banana, gasoline, leather, rose, etc.). If 10 people all smelled the same randomly selected patch, without any hint as to what odor it might contain, would you expect most of them to identify the odor correctly? Would you expect their odor identifications to be fairly consistent with each other, even if not correct? If they were shown a list of the 100 possible odors while making their identification decision, would you expect their identification performances to improve and/or to be more consistent? Explain your answers.

 

 

• Explain why professional wine tasters are no better than the average person at detecting odors despite the training and experience that make them much better than average at discriminating, remembering, and identifying odors.

 

 

• On Monday, Simone ate a piece of smelly cheese with lunch. On Tuesday morning, she woke up with a head cold and couldn’t smell a thing, but she again had a piece of the same smelly cheese with lunch. Which of the following areas of her brain probably showed increased activity when she ate the cheese on Monday but not on Tuesday: amygdala, piriform cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior insular cortex, hypothalamus? Explain why.

 

 

 

 

 

Sample Solution