RESEARCH

Olfactory perception

One central aspect of our research is olfactory perception. Every day, we are surrounded by several thousand odors that differ in complexity and meaning, but most of the time, we are not conscious of them. Often, we only notice an odor when the odor carries some form of information that is of importance to us. This relationship between our percept and the ecological meaning of the odor is intriguing, and is more important in our daily life than most of us realize. On its way from the receptor to the brain, the olfactory signal is already altered at the very first synapse in a context dependent matter. That means that depending on our previous experiences with that particular odor, the signal will be altered accordingly. This is very different from our other sensory systems and gives our olfactory sense a unique position among its sensory system colleagues. Another interesting aspect of olfactory perception is that women's olfactory world seems to change over the course of their menstrual cycle and reproductive states. It has been known for a long time that women are both, more sensitive to and experience a change in percept of olfactory stimuli around the time of ovulation. However, we recently demonstrated that this effect seems to be dependent on both the reproductive state of the woman in question as well as the odor. Why, when, where, and how, is still, sadly, an unanswered questions in this field.

In one of our current projects, we are trying to elucidate the potential impact the ecological relevance of the odor has for these reproductive dependent effects. These efforts entail both behavioral as well as ERP experiments where women's responses to different odorants are investigated.

 

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