Whereas contextual influences in the visual and auditory domains have been largely documented, little is known about how chemical senses might be affected by our multisensory environment. In the present study, we aimed to better understand how a visual context can affect the perception of a rather pleasant (floral) and a rather unpleasant (damp) odor. To this end, 19 healthy participants performed a series of tasks including odor detection followed by perceptual evaluations of odor intensity, pleasantness, flowery, and damp characters of both odors presented at 2 different concentrations. A visual context (either congruent or incongruent with the odor; or a neutral control context) preceded odor stimulations. Olfactomotor responses as well as response times were recorded during the detection task. Results showed an influence of the visual context on semantic and motor responses to the target odors. First, congruency between context and odor increased the saliency of the olfactory feature of the memory trace, for the pleasant floral odor only (higher perceived flowery note). Clinical applications of this finding for olfactory remediation in dysosmic patients are proposed. Second, the unpleasant odor remained unaffected by visual primes, whatever the condition. In addition, incongruency between context and odor (regardless of odor type) had a disruptive effect on odor sampling behavior, which was interpreted as a protective behavior in response to expectancy violation. Altogether, this second series of effects may serve an adaptive function, especially the avoidance of, or simply vigilance toward, aversive and unpredictable stimuli.

中文翻译：

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视觉启动影响嗅觉嗅觉的嗅觉反应和嗅觉。

尽管在视觉和听觉领域中的上下文影响已被大量记录，但对化学感官如何受到我们的多感官环境影响的了解却很少。在本研究中，我们旨在更好地理解视觉环境如何影响令人愉悦的（花香）和令人不愉快的（潮湿）气味的感知。为此，有19名健康参与者执行了一系列任务，包括气味检测，然后以2种不同浓度对两种气味的气味强度，愉悦性，花香和潮湿特征进行感官评估。视觉刺激（与气味完全一致或不一致；或中性控制上下文）先于气味刺激。在检测任务期间记录了嗅动素反应以及反应时间。结果显示视觉环境对语义和运动对目标气味的反应的影响。首先，背景和气味之间的一致性提高了记忆痕迹的嗅觉特征的显着性，仅用于令人愉悦的花香（较高的花香味）。提出了该发现用于难治性患者嗅觉修复的临床应用。第二，无论什么条件，难闻的气味都不受视觉刺激的影响。此外，上下文和气味之间的不一致（无论气味类型如何）对气味采样行为具有破坏性影响，这被解释为针对预期违规的保护行为。总之，这第二系列的效果可以起到适应性的作用，特别是避免或只是警惕厌恶和不可预测的刺激。