Human and non-human animal research converge to suggest that the sense of smell, olfaction, has a high level of plasticity and is intimately associated with visual-spatial orientation and memory encoding networks. We investigated whether olfactory memory (OM) training would lead to transfer to an untrained visual memory (VM) task, as well as untrained olfactory tasks. We devised a memory intervention to compare transfer effects generated by olfactory and non-olfactory (visual) memory training. Adult participants were randomly assigned to daily memory training for about 40 days with either olfactory or visual tasks that had a similar difficulty level. Results showed that while visual training did not produce transfer to the OM task, olfactory training produced transfer to the untrained VM task. Olfactory training also improved participants’ performance on odor discrimination and naming tasks, such that they reached the same performance level as a high-performing group of wine professionals. Our results indicate that the olfactory system is highly responsive to training, and we speculate that the sense of smell may facilitate transfer of learning to other sensory domains. Further research is however needed in order to replicate and extend our findings.

中文翻译：

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基于气味的记忆训练：嗅觉学习和转移到视觉领域的证据。

人类和非人类动物研究汇合表明，嗅觉、嗅觉具有高度的可塑性，并且与视觉空间方向和记忆编码网络密切相关。我们调查了嗅觉记忆 (OM) 训练是否会导致转移到未经训练的视觉记忆 (VM) 任务以及未经训练的嗅觉任务。我们设计了一种记忆干预来比较嗅觉和非嗅觉（视觉）记忆训练产生的转移效应。成人参与者被随机分配到每天大约 40 天的记忆训练中，其中包括具有相似难度级别的嗅觉或视觉任务。结果表明，虽然视觉训练不会转移到 OM 任务，但嗅觉训练会转移到未经训练的 VM 任务。嗅觉训练还提高了参与者在气味辨别和命名任务上的表现，使他们达到与高绩效葡萄酒专业团队相同的表现水平。我们的研究结果表明，嗅觉系统对训练具有高度响应性，我们推测嗅觉可能有助于将学习转移到其他感官领域。然而，需要进一步的研究来复制和扩展我们的发现。