Visual cues and their effects on odour assessment

Describes how 48 subjects participated in experiments to investigate the effect of visual cues in identifying odours. The subjects were first instructed to describe the odour of six fruit solutions, four of which were inappropriately coloured. Second, they were presented with a series of fruit solutions which varied in odour and colour intensity and were asked to rank them in order of odour strength. For the control sets, the odour and colour strengths were compatible; in the experimental sets the odour strength and colour intensity were conflicting. The results of the first experiment indicate that the identification of fruit odours proves significantly more difficult when the colour of the solution is inappropriate (p< 0.05) and in the second experiment more subjects rank the solutions in the correct order when the colour intensity and odour strengths are compatible than when they are conflicting. Visual cues are found to influence odour judgements significantly and, when presented with conflicting stimuli, the visual cues appear to override the olfactory sense and distract the subjects from making the correct assessment.