Avery Gilbert

• PhD, Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
• Founder & Managing Member at Headspace Sensory LLC

Cannabis sativa L. is grown and marketed under a large number of named strains. Strains are often associated with phenotypic traits of interest to consumers, such as aroma and cannabinoid content. Yet genetic inconsistencies have been noted within named strains. We asked whether genetically inconsistent samples of a commercial strain also display i...

Widespread legalization is turning cannabis into big business. As cultivation, manufacturing, and retail sales expand in size and sophistication, the industry appears to be evolving into a commodity market. This paper reviews the state of cannabis with respect to factors that contribute to the success of other luxury consumables such as wine and pe...

Olfactory detection of cannabis aroma by police officers can be the basis for warrantless searches of motor vehicles in many jurisdictions in the United States. The odor source in these cases is often dried cannabis flower contained in various casual wrappings as well as in more elaborate packaging. Here we investigate whether packaging format alte...

Previous research using a check‐all‐that‐apply (CATA) method to describe the strain‐specific aroma of dried Cannabis flower revealed two major clusters, one characterized as woody, earthy, herbal and the other as citrus, lemon, sweet, and pungent. In this study, participants rated 10 strains (including seven strains not previously tested) using num...

The smell of marijuana (Cannabis sativa L.) is of interest to users, growers, plant breeders, law enforcement and, increasingly, to state-licensed retail businesses. The numerous varieties and strains of Cannabis produce strikingly different scents but to date there have been few, if any, attempts to quantify these olfactory profiles directly. Usin...

Color cues impact the chemosensory perception of foods and beverages. Evidence suggests that color exerts these effects through a link with emotion. In this study, color associations to 20 emotion terms were obtained by having 194 participants use a touch-screen display to select a matching color. The resulting color matches were displayed visually...

Human perception of the odour environment is highly variable. People vary both in their general olfactory acuity as well as in if and how they perceive specific odours. In recent years, it has been shown that genetic differences contribute to variability in both general olfactory acuity and the perception of specific odours. Odour perception also d...

Perceptual data.

Judges sorted forty-three odor stimuli into groupings of conceptual similarity, repeating the task over several sessions. There was little between-judges consistency in conceptual structure inferred from the sorting patterns and little within-judges consistency over sessions. The latter suggests that ‘one time’ sorting experiments would give differ...

Measures of emotional state, physical well-being, performance, and room odor were obtained from subjects given the suggestion of a pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral ambient odor (n= 30 per condition). The hedonic quality of the feigned odor altered self-reports of pleasure, but not dominance or arousal. Subjects given the pleasant suggestion reporte...

Research successes over the past decade have provided a broad outline of the neuroscience of olfaction and taste. Our understanding of these systems now spans the molecular to the psychological. It will soon reach critical mass and begin to generate a variety of practical applications with commercial potential. Given the ubiquity of smell and taste...

Explored individual differences in olfactory imagery ability. The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ; D. F. Marks, 1973) was adapted to an olfactory context (the Vividness of Olfactory Imagery Questionnaire). Both measures were administered to 27 fragrance experts and 95 non-expert controls. The results indicate better olfactory imager...

Experiments in cross-modal matching suggest that smells can be arranged by odor quality along the color dimensions of hue and lightness Here we report that subjects readily adjust the loudness-equalized pitch of an auditory tone to match a stimulus odor The results allow odors to be arranged in sequence by their pitch-equivalents The tone matches a...

The effects of ambient odor (pleasant, unpleasant, none); odor suggestion (present, absent); and sex of subject on mood and performance measures were explored in a 3 x 2 x 2 experimental design. A total of 40 men and 40 women performed a clerical task and a speed and accuracy task (digit deletion), filled out self-evaluations of mood, predicted per...

We previously found that untrained subjects make nonrandom color matches to odors and that the color matches are stable over time (Gilbert, Martin, & Kemp, 1996). Here we investigate further aspects of the cross-modal associations between vision and olfaction: whether perceptual dimensions of odor vary systemically with those of vision. Subjects ma...

Olfactory detection thresholds for 11 structurally diverse musk odorants and one non-musk odorant were obtained from 32 subjects. Hierarchical cluster analysis produced four groups of subjects. One group (n = 12) was uniformly sensitive to all musks; another (n = 16) was uniformly insensitive. Two groups of subjects contained otherwise insensitive...

Cross-modal sensory correspondences between vision and audition have been well described, but those between vision and olfaction have not. In Experiment 1, a method previously used to relate color names, mood names, and line elements was replicated and extended to describe odors by color. Significant color characterizations were found for all 20 te...

Tenacious attachment to the mother's nipples by suckling pups has been observed in many rodent species, but apeears to be absent in others. The natural history of this behaviour is reviewed, along with the possible adaptive value. Four hypotheses are extracted from the literature: the antipredator, anti-falling, anti-drowning, and infant-nipple con...

Certain medications and environmental agents are known to adversely affect chemosensation. We report data from 712,000 respondents aged 20 to 79 to the National Geographic Smell Survey that suggest that exposure to the factory workplace adversely affects the sense of smell, and that these effects interact with age. Men and women with histories of f...

Those to whom it falls to summarize the progress of a scientific discipline are often tempted to interpret an accelerating publication rate as a positive indicator of intellectual advance. Were we to subscribe to this approach we should be able to give a very rosy picture indeed of scientific achievement in odour perception and its attendant psycho...

An odor description task was used to explore age-related change in odor perception based on 1.19 million U.S. and Canadian respondents (ages 10–90 years) to the National Geographic Smell Survey. Respondents sampled six microencapsulated odorants and selected 1 of 11 descriptors to characterize each smell. Four odors were characterized by strong con...

A survey of 1,177,507 U.S. men and women between the ages of 10 and 86 included questions regarding hand preference for writing and throwing. Three effects were observed. Individuals with at least some left motoric bias comprised a smaller percent of the population with advancing age. This finding provides large-scale confirmation of a previously d...

Olfactory perception is one of the last great frontiers of contemporary neuroscience. While our understanding of receptor activation and stimulus transduction has expanded greatly in recent years, the central processing of olfactory information—its encoding, transformation, and intermodal integration—is known schematically at best.

Results of the National Geographic Smell Survey were used to investigate the effects of pregnancy on olfactory perception and odor-related behavior. The responses to test odors and survey questions of 13,610 pregnant and 277,228 nonpregnant U.S. women between 20 and 40 years of age were analyzed. In comparison to nonpregnant women, pregnant women r...

Active anterior rhinomanometry was used to observe nasal airflow in five men and four women (ages 18-30). Measurements were obtained for each nasal passage every 5 min throughout an uninterrupted 8-hr session. Facial skin temperature from the left and right side of the face was recorded simultaneously from thermocouples. Observations were made duri...

Multidimensional scaling was used to analyze odor similarity judgments obtained by monorhinic (single nostril) stimulation from normal subjects (N = 52), equally partitioned by sex and handedness. Neither sex nor handedness nor side of nose appeared to alter the position of stimuli on a two-dimensional map of odor similarity. However, women produce...

Rhinomanometric observations of nasal airway patency were obtained for each nasal passage every 10 min throughout an uninterrupted 8-h session. The 49 airflow observations for each nasal passage were subjected to autocorrelation analysis, a statistical technique for quantifying periodicities in a temporal sequence of observations. No significant pe...

The facial responses of seven female subjects were videotaped while they smelled six odors in each of three experimental conditions (spontaneous, posing to real odors and posing to imagined odors). Videotaping was covert in the spontaneous condition and overt in the posed conditions. Raters (N = 65) were shown the videotapes and asked to judge whet...

Roberts' proposal of a nasal route of entry for an Alzheimer's disease pathogen leads to a prediction of olfactory dysfunction in Alzheimer's patients. Recent studies suggesting the presence of olfactory deficits are reviewed. Special attention is given to problems in examining olfactory function in demented patients.

Examined, in 5 experiments, whether the olfactory differences apparent to mice are also accessible to humans, using a total of 63 human Ss. In Exp I, Ss were asked to distinguish between the whole-body odors of live mice differing genetically only at the major histocompatibility gene complex (H-2). In Exps II and III, the odor source was mouse feca...

A series of experiments revealed that humans can use olfaction to discriminate closely related strains of mice, differing genetically only at the major histocompatibility gene complex (H -2). In Experiment 1, subjects were asked to distinguish between the whole-body odors of live mice. In Experiments 2 and 3, the odor source was mouse fecal pellets...

Litter size and mammary number in the mammalian order Rodentia show a significant positive correlation. Mean litter size is typically one-half the number of available mammaries, while maximum litter size approximates mammary number. Similar relationships are found in the families Muridae, Cricetidae, and Sciuridae. The relationship of litter size t...

The factors which permit altruistic behaviors to be differentially directed to kin and non-kin have aroused much interest. Hamilton’s (1964) development of the concept of inclusive fitness allowed a rationale for the evolution of altruistic behavior. However, in order to evolve, such behaviors must be directed at kin, and thus kin and non-kin must...

Two temporal variables have been implicated in the timing of postpartum heat in Norway rats: time of day and time since parturition. The nature of the interaction between these variables is not clearly understood. We extend previous observations on this problem to freely behaving animals continuously videotaped during parturition and postpartum mat...

The postpartum sexual and maternal behaviour of Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) was observed in a seminatural habitat. Behavioural decision-making by the female was examined by disrupting the nest and newborn offspring during mating. In experiment 1, multiparous females responded to nest disruption with an increase in maternal behaviour that was la...

Virgin rodents exhibiting cycling estrus have traditionally been used for comparative studies of reproductive behavior. However estrus occurs in other life-history contexts, some of which differ from cycling estrus (CE) in that (a) the female is disposed to behave both maternally and sexually and (b) they result in litter overlap (i.e., the simulta...

Conducted a literature search of the occurrence of postpartum estrus (PPE) and lactation estrus (LE) in 15 families, 71 genera, and 141 species of the order Rodentia. Analysis showed that PPE and LE were nonrandomly distributed across taxa. They were statistically overrepresented in the family Cricetidae and underrepresented in squirrels (Sciuridae...

When female Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) become pregnant at the postpartum estrus they nurse this first litter concurrently with the gestation of a second litter. This second gestation is of variable length (23-31 days in this study) We investigated the behavior of mothers and their older litters around the time the second litter was born. Six f...

Virgin female rats were mated at a freely cycling oestrus, and then again with the same males at the subsequent postpartum oestrus. Copulatory behaviour at each mating was compared and the temporal patterning of the female's mating and maternal behaviour was analysed. Postpartum females were found to conserve the number of ejaculatory series receiv...