Sorokowska Agnieszka, Sorokowski Piotr, Hummel Thomas
Institute of Psychology, University of Wroclaw, ul. Dawida 1, 50-527 Wroclaw, Poland ; TU Dresden, Medical Faculty Carl Gustav Carus, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Smell & Taste Clinic, Dresden, Germany.
Institute of Psychology, University of Wroclaw, ul. Dawida 1, 50-527 Wroclaw, Poland.
Chemosens Percept. 2014;7(2):85-90. doi: 10.1007/s12078-014-9169-0. Epub 2014 Apr 22.
Olfactory sensitivity can be evaluated by various tests, with "Sniffin' Sticks" test (SST) being one of the most popular. SST consists of tests for odor threshold, discrimination, and identification. It seems relatively straightforward to administer threshold tests in different groups and societies and it has been shown that odor identification tests requires special adaptation before they can be administered to various populations. However, few studies have investigated the application of an odor discrimination task in various regions/cultures. In the present study, we compared the discrimination scores of 169 Polish people with the scores of 99 Tsimane', Bolivian Amerindians. The Tsimane' participants scored very low in the discrimination task, despite their general high olfactory sensitivity. This result suggests that when a discrimination task is chosen as the form of olfactory testing, some additional variables need to be controlled. We suggest three sources of low scores of our participants-their cognitive profile, the cultural background, i.e., little knowledge of the odors used in the discrimination test and problems associated with testing environment.
嗅觉灵敏度可以通过各种测试来评估，“嗅棒”测试（SST）是最常用的测试之一。SST包括气味阈值、辨别和识别测试。在不同群体和社会中进行阈值测试似乎相对简单，并且已经表明，气味识别测试在应用于不同人群之前需要进行特殊调整。然而，很少有研究调查气味辨别任务在不同地区/文化中的应用。在本研究中，我们比较了169名波兰人与99名玻利维亚美洲印第安人齐曼内人的辨别分数。尽管齐曼内人参与者的总体嗅觉灵敏度较高，但他们在辨别任务中的得分非常低。这一结果表明，当选择辨别任务作为嗅觉测试的形式时，需要控制一些额外的变量。我们提出了参与者得分低的三个原因——他们的认知特征、文化背景，即对辨别测试中使用的气味了解甚少，以及与测试环境相关的问题。
