Klutky N
Institut für Psychologie, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M.
Z Exp Angew Psychol. 1990;37(3):437-46.
Sense of olfaction would seem to be of little importance for human behavior. However, a closer look at this from the psychological point of view reveals many interesting aspects, such as sex differences in olfactory perception, that are of interest to differential psychology. The present study deals with sex differences in the memory for odors; we assume that women will do better here than men while other memory tasks involving acoustical and optical stimuli will show no such differences. Sixty women and 40 men were examined. On the first day, they had to retain 10 odors, 10 random-generated tone-sequences, and 10 colors. On the second day, 20 such stimuli for each memory task were presented, and the subjects had to remember and to tell which were known and which of them were unknown stimuli to them. A significant advantage in the olfaction memory task was found for women, while acoustical and optical memory scores showed no such differences. This expected finding is discussed in two ways. First, the female advantage might result from phylogenetic sources. Second, it might arise because women in general more often than men seem to deal with olfactory cues, so that they might simply have more experience and therefore the greater chance to score higher in an odor memory task.
嗅觉似乎对人类行为没什么重要性。然而，从心理学角度仔细审视这一点会发现许多有趣的方面，比如嗅觉感知中的性别差异，这是差异心理学所感兴趣的。本研究探讨了气味记忆中的性别差异；我们假定女性在这方面会比男性表现更好，而其他涉及听觉和视觉刺激的记忆任务则不会有这样的差异。对60名女性和40名男性进行了测试。第一天，他们必须记住10种气味、10个随机生成的音调序列和10种颜色。第二天，针对每个记忆任务呈现20种这样的刺激，受试者必须记住并说出哪些是他们已知的，哪些是未知的刺激。结果发现女性在嗅觉记忆任务中有显著优势，而听觉和视觉记忆得分则没有这样的差异。这一预期发现从两个方面进行了讨论。首先，女性的优势可能源于种系发生方面的原因。其次，可能是因为总体而言女性比男性更常接触嗅觉线索，所以她们可能只是有更多经验，因此在气味记忆任务中得分更高的机会更大。
