Temple University, Eleanor M. Saffran Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Philadelphia PA, USA.
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.
Neurocase. 2021 Feb;27(1):86-96. doi: 10.1080/13554794.2020.1871491. Epub 2021 Jan 5.
A longstanding debate within philosophy and neuroscience involves the extent to which sensory information is a necessary condition for conceptual knowledge. Much of our understanding of this relationship has been informed by examining the impact of congenital blindness and deafness on language and cognitive development. Relatively little is known about the "lesser" senses of smell and taste. Here we report a neuropsychological case-control study contrasting a young adult male (P01) diagnosed with anosmia (i.e. no olfaction) during early childhood relative to an age- and sex-matched control group. A structural MRI of P01's brain revealed profoundly atrophic/aplastic olfactory bulbs, and standardized smell testing confirmed his prior pediatric diagnosis of anosmia. Participants completed three language experiments examining comprehension, production, and subjective experiential ratings of odor salient words (e.g. sewer) and scenarios (e.g. fish market). P01's ratings of odor salience of single words were lower than all control participants, whereas his ratings on five other perceptual and affective dimensions were similar to controls. P01 produced unusual associations when cued to generate words that smelled similar to odor-neutral target words (e.g. ink → plant). In narrative picture description for odor salient scenes (e.g. bakery), P01 was indistinguishable from controls. These results suggest that odor deprivation does not overtly impair functional language use. However, subtle lexical-semantic effects of anosmia may be revealed using sensitive linguistic measures.
长期以来，哲学和神经科学领域一直存在争议，即感官信息在多大程度上是概念知识的必要条件。我们对这种关系的理解在很大程度上是通过检查先天性失明和失聪对语言和认知发展的影响而得出的。关于嗅觉和味觉的“次要”感觉，我们知之甚少。在这里，我们报告了一项神经心理学病例对照研究，该研究比较了一名在儿童早期被诊断为嗅觉丧失（即无嗅觉）的年轻成年男性（P01）与年龄和性别匹配的对照组。对 P01 大脑的结构 MRI 显示其嗅球严重萎缩/发育不良，标准化嗅觉测试证实了他之前儿科诊断的嗅觉丧失。参与者完成了三项语言实验，分别检查了对气味突出单词（例如 sewer）和场景（例如 fish market）的理解、生成和主观体验评分。P01 对单个单词的气味突出程度的评分低于所有对照组参与者，而他对其他五个感知和情感维度的评分与对照组相似。当被提示生成与气味中性目标单词（例如 ink → plant）相似的单词时，P01 会产生不寻常的联想。在对气味突出场景（例如 bakery）的描述性图片描述中，P01 与对照组没有区别。这些结果表明，嗅觉剥夺不会明显损害功能性语言使用。然而，使用敏感的语言测量方法可能会揭示出嗅觉丧失的微妙词汇语义影响。
