Predator odors can elicit fear responses in prey and predator odor recognition is generally associated with physiological responses. Prey species are often more likely to respond to the odor of familiar rather than alien predators. However, predator naïvety in an introduced prey species has rarely been investigated. We examined the physiological response, as shown by changes in ventilatory vari...

Two studies were conducted to examine the nature of the verbal labels that describe emotional effects elicited by odors. In Study 1, a list of terms selected for their relevance to describe affective feelings induced by odors was assessed while participants were exposed to a set of odorant samples. The data were submitted to a series of exploratory factor analyses to 1) reduce the set of variab...

Although we know much about familiar faces or objects that we temporarily cannot name, what do we know about familiar odors that we cannot name? Two experiments here examined this issue, by comparing the reliability of responses to various questions using 2 tests, with odors that were consistently named or given similar or very different names on each test occasion. Reliability estimates for va...

Emissions odors, gases, and dust from livestock production facilities arise primarily from three sources; buildings, manure storages, and land application (1). Emissions from buildings and storages form a baseline emission level. Eliminating emissions from one of the sources will likely not eliminate emissions entirely. Control technologies often address only one of the three sources. Many of t...

Training can improve the ability to discriminate between similar, confusable stimuli, including odors. One possibility of enhancing behaviorally expressed discrimination (i.e., sensory acuity) relies on differential associative learning, during which animals are forced to detect the differences between similar stimuli. Drosophila represents a key model organism for analyzing neuronal mechanisms...

The prevalence of perceptions of odors and sensations of air humidity and sick building syndrome symptoms in domestic environments were studied using responses to a questionnaire on the home environment. Parents of 4530 1-8 year old children from randomly selected kindergartens in Chongqing, China participated. Stuffy odor, unpleasant odor, pungent odor, mold odor, tobacco smoke odor, humid air...

Episodic memory involves remembering the incidental order of a series of events that comprise a specific experience. Current models of temporal organization in episodic memory have demonstrated that animals can make memory judgments about the order of serially presented events; however, in these protocols, the animals can judge items based on their relative recency. Thus, it remains unclear as ...

The olfactory acuity of mice allows them to discriminate odors of conspecifics differing by a few genes. This acuity is used in habituation procedures where investigation of novel odors by the mouse can be translated into relative difference or similarity between the stimuli. This study adapts these behavioral procedures to address suprapopulation divergence among urinary odors in the house mou...

Food-associated cues of different sensory categories have often been shown to be a potent elicitor of cerebral activity in brain reward circuits. Smells influence and modify the hedonic qualities of eating experience, and in contrast to smells not associated with food, perception of food-associated odors may activate dopaminergic brain areas. In this study, we aimed to verify previous findings ...

Previous research suggests that body odorants, including anal scents and urinary odors, contribute to sex discrimination and mate identification in European ferrets of both sexes. We assessed the possible role of the vomeronasal organ (VNO) in these functions by surgically removing the organ bilaterally in sexually experienced female ferrets. Lesioned (VNOx) and sham-operated control (VNOi) fem...