Influence du contexte sémantique sur la performance d'identification d'odeurs

Our olfactory knowledge is mainly implicit and the last step for cognitive processing of odors - naming - is not always performed. To facilitate naming, odor identification by forced choice between alternatives is used. However, presenting names induces semantic priming. To assess which level of spontaneous odor processing is influenced by semantic context, we compared three priming conditions. Our results indicate that the identification process is based mainly on the rejection of semantic categories that are most remote from the target, and firstly of those with a different hedonic valence. The analysis of identification errors supports the hypothesis that odor naming rests more on global semantic discriminations than on what is called lexical access in other sensory modes.