Speed Laura J, Majid Asifa
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Cogn Sci. 2018 May;42(4):1146-1178. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12593. Epub 2018 Feb 14.
Do we mentally simulate olfactory information? We investigated mental simulation of odors and sounds in two experiments. Participants retained a word while they smelled an odor or heard a sound, then rated odor/sound intensity and recalled the word. Later odor/sound recognition was also tested, and pleasantness and familiarity judgments were collected. Word recall was slower when the sound and sound-word mismatched (e.g., bee sound with the word typhoon). Sound recognition was higher when sounds were paired with a match or near-match word (e.g., bee sound with bee or buzzer). This indicates sound-words are mentally simulated. However, using the same paradigm no memory effects were observed for odor. Instead it appears odor-words only affect lexical-semantic representations, demonstrated by higher ratings of odor intensity and pleasantness when an odor was paired with a match or near-match word (e.g., peach odor with peach or mango). These results suggest fundamental differences in how odor and sound-words are represented.
我们会在脑海中模拟嗅觉信息吗？我们通过两个实验对气味和声音的心理模拟进行了研究。参与者在闻到一种气味或听到一种声音时记住一个单词，然后对气味/声音强度进行评分并回忆该单词。随后还测试了对气味/声音的识别，并收集了愉悦度和熟悉度判断。当声音与声音所对应的单词不匹配时（例如，蜜蜂的声音对应“台风”这个词），单词回忆会变慢。当声音与匹配或近乎匹配的单词配对时（例如，蜜蜂的声音对应“蜜蜂”或“蜂鸣器”），声音识别率更高。这表明声音与单词在心理上是被模拟的。然而，使用相同的范式，并未观察到气味有记忆效应。相反，气味与单词似乎仅影响词汇语义表征，当一种气味与匹配或近乎匹配的单词配对时（例如，桃子气味对应“桃子”或“芒果”），气味强度和愉悦度的评分更高就证明了这一点。这些结果表明气味和声音与单词的表征方式存在根本差异。
