Joachim Degel’s research while affiliated with Utrecht University and other places

Die Schaffung von individuellen Marken ist heute für viele Unternehmen die zentrale Aufgabe des Marketing und Voraussetzung für den künftigen Erfolg am Markt. Doch warum werden Marken immer wichtiger für ein Produkt oder einen Service, der sich dahinter verbirgt? Die Antwort ist einfach: Marken erlauben in der Kommunikation das Senden eines klaren Signals, welches sich vom Rauschen der sonst vielfältig vorhandenen Kommunikation abhebt. Inhalte werden so schneller sortierbar und ergeben für den Empfänger, den Kunden, ein Muster. Dadurch wird Kommunikation schneller erfass- und merkbar und erfüllt damit die Grundvoraussetzung um Individualität durch Identität auszudrücken.

The human organs of perception are constantly bombarded with chemicals from the environment. Our bodies have in turn developed complex processing systems, which manifest themselves in our emotions, memory, and language. Yet the available data on the high order cognitive implications of taste and smell are scattered among journals in many fields, with no single source synthesizing the large body of knowledge, much of which has appeared in the last decade. This book presents the first multidisciplinary synthesis of the literature in olfactory and gustatory cognition. Leading experts have written chapters on many facets of taste and smell, including odor memory, cortical representations, psychophysics and functional imaging studies, genetic variation in taste, and the hedonistic dimensions of odors. The approach is integrative, combining perspectives from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics, and is appropriate for students and researchers in all of these areas who seek an authoritative reference on olfaction, taste, and cognition.

To test the hypothesis that longevity of odor memory is due to strong proactive interference (reduction of new learning by prior learning) and to absence of retroactive interference (reduction of prior memory by new learning), subjects, matched in age and gender with those of a previous experiment, were unknowingly exposed in two sessions to the weak concentrations of lavender or orange used before. Implicit odor memory was later tested in a separate experiment. Comparison of the results with those of the previous experiment showed that both proactive and retroactive interference occurred. These results have implications for the general theory about implicit memory for new associations, which may have to be amended when non-verbal material is used. The longevity of odor memory should be explained by the improbability of occurrence of incidences that provoke retroactive interference rather than by the absence of the retroactive interference itself.

One hundred and fifty-two subjects, divided into eight groups, were exposed to a room with a low concentration of either orange or lavender and to an odorless room. In a careful double-blind procedure, neither the subjects nor the experimenters were made aware of the presence of the odors in the experimental conditions. Later they were asked to indicate how well each of 12 odor stimuli, including the experimental and control odors, befitted each of 12 visual contexts, including the exposure rooms. At the end of this session they rated the pleasantness and the familiarity of the odors, and identified them by name. Finally they were debriefed and asked specifically whether they had perceived the experimental odors anywhere in the building. The results of four subjects who answered positively to the latter question were omitted. The results confirm the earlier finding that non-identifiers implicitly link odor and exposure room, whereas identifiers do not show such a link. It is suggested that episodic information is an essential constituent of olfactory memory and that its function is comparable to that of form and structure in visual and auditory memory systems.

In order to assess the influence of odors on human performance and implicit memory for odors, 108 subjects completed a variety of tests in weakly scented (jasmine, lavender or odorless) rooms without having been made aware of the odor. After a 30 min interval the subjects were shown slides of different surroundings, including the room they had been in, and were requested to rate how well a set of 12 odors, including a blank, would fit to these surroundings. Half of these contexts contained visual cues related to two of the presented odors (leather and coffee). After the rating of fit the subjects had to rate the odors for pleasantness, were asked to identify the odors with their correct names and to tell where and when they had last smelled these odors. One subject remembered smelling the odor (jasmine) in the room and was discarded from the analysis of the results for the rating of fit. None of the others reported recollection of the experimental odors. The results showed that in general jasmine had a negative and lavender a positive effect on test performance. If an odor-related visual cue was present in the context, the related odor was always rated highest in fit to that context. Furthermore, the subjects working in rooms with an odor subsequently assigned this odor to the visual context of that room to a significantly higher degree than subjects working in rooms with different odors. Since none of the subjects reported that they had smelled the odor in the rooms where performance testing took place, it was concluded that the memory for these odors was implicit. Further analysis showed that such memory was only found in subjects who were unable to supply the right name for the odor. The possible consequences of this latter finding for understanding the relationship between sensory (episodic) and semantic odor memory are discussed.

In an experiment 143 subjects were instructed to assign odors to contexts which were displayed in a slide session. The slides depicted contexts from three areas of everyday life which partly contained visual cues related to a presented odor. After rating the fit of each odor to a context, the subjects rated the odors for pleasantness. Analysis showed a strong influence of the visual cue on the rating of fit for the contexts containing an odor-related visual element. In contexts without a visual cue, rating of fit showed an influence of implicitly learned memories of odor. The rating was not affected by the pleasantness of the odors. The 1995 work of Schab and Crowder is critically reviewed, and results are discussed within the framework of new, more ecologically oriented research on memory for odor.