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Children’s exposure to odors in everyday contexts predicts their odor awareness

  • Published:
Chemosensory Perception

Abstract

Introduction

A great degree of interindividual variability has been reported in measures of psychophysical olfactory performance and odor awareness in both children and adults. Previous studies have suggested the possibility that one of the factors that might contribute to this variability could be the degree of odor exposure experienced in everyday contexts.

Aim

In the present study, we hypothesized that children exposed to a greater variety of odors on a more frequent basis exhibit higher odor identification, discrimination, and odor awareness scores.

Results

We have found an effect of odor exposure on one aspect of the children’s olfactory knowledge as reflected in their reports of olfactory behavior, but not olfactory abilities. In so doing, we have replicated some of the previous findings in the literature of the female advantage in the olfactory domain. Namely, we report that girls showed a more profound metacognitive understanding of their sense of smell and a greater degree of olfaction-oriented behavior, which was not accounted for by a gender difference in verbal fluency. Nevertheless, girls did not outperform boys on any of the olfactory tests.

Conclusion

Semi-longitudinal and longitudinal studies in verbally proficient children, employing both self- and parental reports of children’s odor exposure and repeated olfactory testing, may provide insight into whether children exposed more frequently to a greater variety of odors over the longer term come to exhibit greater odor awareness and superior performance in olfactory tests.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Camille Ferdenzi for providing them with the Olfactory Diversity Questionnaire (ODQ) and its translation from French to English, and Anna Šandová and Jan Havlíček for providing them with the Czech translation of the Children’s Olfactory Behaviors in Everyday Life Questionnaire (COBEL). We are very grateful to the children and their parents for their participation, and school principals and teachers for allowing us to perform the study in school premises. We would also like to thank the three reviewers for their constructive feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, U Kříže 8, 158 00, Prague 5 - Jinonice, Czech Republic

    Lenka Martinec Nováková & Radka Vojtušová Mrzílková

  2. National Institute of Mental Health, Topolová 748, 250 67, Klecany, Czech Republic

    Lenka Martinec Nováková

Authors
  1. Lenka Martinec Nováková
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  2. Radka Vojtušová Mrzílková
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Correspondence to Lenka Martinec Nováková.

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Funding

This publication was supported by the project “National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH-CZ)”, grant number ED2.1.00/03.0078 and the European Regional Development Fund, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports—Institutional Support for Longterm Development of Research Organizations—Charles University, Faculty of Humanities (PRVOUK P20) and has been funded as part of the Specific Academic Research project (SVV) 2015 and 2016 numbers 260 239 and 260 348, respectively. LMN is supported by the Charles University Research Centre (UNCE 204004).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

Details of institutional ethical approval for the research, and ethical procedures followed, are given in the “Participants” section.

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Martinec Nováková, L., Vojtušová Mrzílková, R. Children’s exposure to odors in everyday contexts predicts their odor awareness. Chem. Percept. 9, 56–68 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12078-016-9205-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12078-016-9205-3

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