A strawberry by any other name would smell as sweet, green, fruity and buttery. Multisensory cognition of a food aroma

This brief report presents illustrative findings from the first implementation for recognition of an aroma of individualised analysis of cognition as normed discriminations. Two assessors compared mixtures of four odorants with a fresh strawberry in overall aroma, its intensity and balance, and in the smell of each odorant conceptualised in their own words. By the second session, each assessor's judgments of overall likeness of a mixture to strawberry focused on one of the six mental processes tested. One assessor acquired a configural conceptualisation of all the odorants as smelling the same as strawberry. The other asssessor learnt to rate strawberriness by conceptualising the four odorants separately in judgments of both intensity and balance. Even this modest amount of data provides insights into mental mechanisms by which an individual perceives the complex profile of odorants released by a familiar material.