Acquisition of verbal associations to olfactory stimuli of varying familiarity and to abstract visual stimuli.

Two paired-associate (PA) learning studies observed the acquisition performance of 85 college students with either odors or abstract figures as stimuli and numbers as responses. In both studies visual PA acquisition was reliably superior to olfactory learning. Since the second study was designed to maximize the learning of associations to the odors and minimize the learning of associations to the figures, it appears that the sense of smell is not as well suited to the PA task as vision when essentially naive subjects are involved. In a third experiment, the familiarity of odors and figures was judged and reported as a graphic magnitude estimation response. These judged stimulus familiarities were used to select stimuli for the PA task. Subsequently, PA acquisition was facilitated by the use of highly familiar odors.