Languages & Linguistics
Olfactory Imagery
Olfactory imagery refers to the use of descriptive language to evoke the sense of smell in literature or communication. It involves creating vivid and sensory descriptions related to scents and odors to engage the reader's olfactory senses. This type of imagery can enhance the overall sensory experience of a piece of writing, making it more immersive and evocative.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
4 Key excerpts on "Olfactory Imagery"
eBook - ePub- Frank R. Schab, Robert G. Crowder(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
But experience is not evidence. It is where the need for psychological analysis steps in; it poses the question of whether and how Olfactory Imagery may be brought into the laboratory, uncontaminated by those external contributions which are so inevitable in everyday experience. That is the mandate of this chapter. Although many of us are confident about our ability to image odors (Brower, 1947; Lindauer, 1969), our introspections on this may ultimately prove fallacious, just as average people’s confidence in their ability to identify objects by smell alone has been shown to be unrealistically high (see de Wijk, Schab, & Cain, chapter 3, this volume). One reason for the scarcity of experimental data on odor imagery is the difficulty of designing sensitive and appropriate laboratory techniques for studying the phenomenon. Looking to the literature on visual imagery turns out to be of little help, because some of the standard paradigms for studying visual imagery make little or no sense when translated to the olfactory domain. For example, the processing of an olfactory image, in the tradition of Shepard and Metzler’s (1971) demonstration of mental rotation, seems at this point to be an elusive goal, as does an olfactory adaptation of the scanning of images in the manner of Kosslyn (1980) and his associates. Size scaling (Bundesen & Larson, 1975; Sekular & Nash, 1972) appears to offer no approach, either. Olfactory responses are notoriously sluggish, so we do not naturally think of reaction-time methods like that of Posner, Boies, Eichelman and Taylor (1969) from the start, although slow processing does not in principle disqualify response timing as an index
eBook - ePub- E. Bruce Goldstein(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 16 , 656–664.Morrot, G., Brochet, F., & Dubourdieu, D. (2001). The color of odors. Brain & Language, 79 , 309–320.Schifferstein, H. (1997). Perceptual and imaginary mixtures in chemosensation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 23 , 278–288.Stevenson, R., & Case, T. (2005). Olfactory Imagery: A review. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 12 , 244–264.OLFACTORY LOCALIZATIONAnimals must find food, find mates, and avoid potential dangers, such as predators, to survive and perpetuate their species. To achieve these goals, the vast majority of animals use their senses to navigate though their environments. Myriad organisms, from bacteria to humans, sense ambient chemicals to help them navigate. Olfaction (smell), the modality that senses volatile chemicals, is especially important for many organisms.An odorous molecule contains no spatial information. However, as molecules are deposited on surfaces or spread out in air or water, their pattern of deposition over space and time can provide rich information regarding the location of the source that emitted them. The exact information available, and how this information is used, depends on the species and the medium in which the odor is found (for example, a scent trail on the ground versus airborne molecules traveling downwind from a source). In addition, it is becoming increasingly clear that, although animals can locate objects purely through olfactory cues in some situations, animals usually navigate by integrating olfactory information with information from the other senses. Some topics discussed in this entry are: tracking odor trails, the spatial information present in odors dispersed in fluid, tracking using signals from chemicals dispersed in fluid, the integration of information from odor and other senses, and whether humans can track using odors.
eBook - PDFSmellosophy
What the Nose Tells the Mind
- A. S. Barwich(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
One plausible sci-entific explanation notes that olfaction and language processing share some cortical resources in neural coding. That implies that olfactory performance in humans could have diminished as a re-sult of increased language processing. General difficulties in the attribution of words to smells count as additional evidence for this trade-off hypothesis. Impoverished linguistic abilities in naming odor would mirror a general condition of human biology. As White added, “Tyler Lorig would say that there are brain limitations in terms of tying the specific odor to language.” 25 It is as yet uncer-tain whether this explanation is conclusive. Anthropological studies suggest that the limited scope of odor language is not a biological fact. It might be grounded in cultural or behavioral indifference. Some societies work with a profound lexicon of smells that relates to a richer culture of olfactory habits and customs, as the cognitive scientist Asifa Majid (previously at 100 Smellosophy Radboud University, now at the University of York) emphasized. Her research on language also involves South Asian communities. “For the Jahai,” a population indigenous to Thailand, Majid ex-plained that smell is of utmost social importance. 26 “You can’t cook two different types of meat on one fire. The Jahai will make two separate fires some distance apart so that the smell of the meats doesn’t mix—because if they mix, their thunder god in the sky smells them and that’s bad. You’re breaking a taboo if you do that. Or certain smells make you sick, but you can use other smells to counteract them. Or a brother and sister shouldn’t sit too close together because their smells mixing is a kind of incest and so that shouldn’t happen.” The cross-cultural examination of language and behavior can provide fresh insights and attract broader attention for the condi-tions connecting perception and cognition.
- Jorg Roche, Moiken Jessen(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- LIT Verlag(Publisher)
95 3 Linguistic Imagery It is astounding to see how important the role of images is in our mind. Not only in terms of modern media (visual turn) but also in the realm of lan- guage. As imagery in language is so prevalent in everyday lives the present chapter will concentrate solely on language imagery and its special role in cognition and language acquisition. To illustrate the prevalence of images in language, let us look at a couple of expressions such as to solve a prob- lem or to break someone’s heart. If we took the expressions at face value, we would have to expect a chemical experiment on an issue (in the sense of the dissolution of something in an acidic solution) or a physical assault on someone’s heart. In the first part of the chapter, we will explore how such metaphors and metonymies work and how traditional linguistics describes and explains these phenomena. Subsequently, we will discuss cognitive mechanisms fundamental to the ubiquitous imagery use in language We will also elab- orate on metonymy, a linguistic element quite similar to metaphor. The conceptual metaphor theory will be presented and compared with the tra- ditional (literary) perspective on metaphors. We will touch on the concep- tual metaphor’s ability to represent mappings between cultural domains, and we will address the role of imagery for the way we think. It will be shown how abstract concepts can be understood through images. Finally, we will explore the role of imagery with respect to the processes of knowledge construction, knowledge representation and knowledge storage in a learner’s mind. 96 3.1 Linguistic Imagery and the Conceptual Metaphor Natalya Furashova, Moiken Jessen & Katsiaryna EL-Bouz Sometimes, people are not straightforward with what they mean to say, and – on the other hand – words are not always used to express their literal meaning. We could, for instance, say about a person that he is cun- ning or clever.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
