Okumura and colleagues found that the names we give odors influence our responses to them. The group shares that “Olfactory perception depends not only on olfactory inputs but also on semantic context. . . . We found that identical odorants labeled with different words were perceived differently. . . . These results suggest that multi-voxel patterns of piriform activity can be modulated by semantic context, possibly due to communication between the piriform cortex and the semantic and memory regions.”
Toshiki Okumura, Ikuhiro Kida, Atsushi Yokoi, Tomoya Nakai, Shinji Nishimoto, Kazushige Touhara, and Masako Okamoto. 2024. “Semantic Context-Dependent Neural Representations of Odors in the Human Piriform Cortex Revealed by 7T MRI.” Human Brain Mapping, vol. 45, no. 6, e26681, https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.26681