Essential reading for any student or researcher entering, or already working, in the field of olfaction. (Graham Bell
ChemoSense 2006)
An important contribution that deserves to be widely read It is a landmark that may reshape efforts in this field. (Rehan M. Khan and Noam Sobel
Nature Neuroscience 2007)
A recommended pick for any college-level health library holding. (
Midwest Book Review 2007)
This well-written book deals with a relevant topic in a new and refreshing manner; you can add it to your psychology library with confidence that it will be both interesting and informative. (Stephen F. Davis
PsycCRITIQUES 2007)
This is a must-read for olfaction researchers And is currently the best 'introduction to olfaction' that is available. I highly recommend this book. (Noam Sobel
Quarterly Review of Biology )
This new view of olfactory cognition brings to bear many fascinating possibilities for future study in human response to odor stimulus that can have application in medicine and commercial sales. (
Biology Digest )
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
The biggest felonies in sensory science have to do with equating (1) the physical stimulus, or (2) early neural signals, with psychological perception. For instance, as long as a vision scientist confuses wavelength with color, he will have no tenable scientific understanding of color, and he will at best publish confusing research. Alternatively, if he thinks that he can understand color based on the simple outputs of three cone photoreceptors, he will remain in the dark, so to speak.
Perhaps it is not fair to accuse most olfactory scientists of the aforementioned felony. However, most of them, apparently, have focused on the front end of system, attempting to understand how chemicals are transduced into neural signals and represented in the olfactory system. If their explanation of odor detection and discrimination ends there, they've blown it.
The authors suggest that, historically, researchers have mostly attempted to determine how a chemical stimulus is represented in the olfactory system, without considering context and learning.
However, the authors note that this perspective is at odds with considerable neurobiological and psychological data, which demonstrate the importance of perceptual learing (i.e., synthetic processing and experiential factors) as opposed to the structural features of the stimulus as critical for odor discrimination. In reviewing the evidence, the authors conclude that the initial odorant features are not consciously accessible, and that this extraction is at best a first necessary stage for subsequent cortical synthetic processing. "Cortical synthetic coding reflects an experience-dependent process that allows synthesis of novel co-occurring features, similar to processes used for visual object coding. Thus, we propose that experience and cortical plasticity are not only important for traditional associative olfactory memory (e.g. fear conditioning, maze learning, and delayed-match-to-sample paradigms), but also play a critical, defining role in odor discrimination."
So, this book is on target because it frees itself from the shackles of simple models of chemical pattern recognition.
I'm not an expert on olfaction. My appreciation of this book was greatly enhanced by reading a very good introductory chapter on olfaction. This chapter appeared in Wolfe et al (Sensation & Perception, 2005), and was authored primarily (I believe) by Rachel Herz. This chapter included many informative illustrations, and the textbook website at Sinauer included an excellent section on sensory memory cues based on Herz' research. (I wish this book had colorful illustrations).
The authors do a superb job of comparing olfaction and olfaction research to research on the other senses, in particular the visual sense. They note the many similarities among sensory systems, and use these similarities to inform their analyses and their research. Moreover, they integrate their understanding of learning, memory and pattern recognition into the theoretical approach.
The integrative nature of this book was definitely a plus. If you are a psychophysicist or cognitive scientist, then it is hard to disagree with the authors on the key points of their theory.
