Influence of pre-exposure and cognitive task on the perception of odor blending mixtures in humans

Slight variations in components ratio affect odor pleasantness of a blending mixture

International audience; Odors rely mainly on the perception of odorants mixtures but are commonly perceived as single undivided entities; nevertheless, the processes involved remain poorly explored. It has been reported that perceptual blending, based on configural olfactory processing, can lead odorant mixtures to give rise to an emergent odor quality not present in the components. Furthermore, very slight variations (just noticeable differences, jnd) in components concentrations were shown to be sufficient to modify the odor quality of a blending mixture. In the present study, we set out to examine whether jnd in components concentrations could also affect the odor pleasantness of a blend…