PSYC 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Olfactory Receptor Neuron, Literary Adaptation, Anosmia

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 212
• Professor: Reza Farivar

Document Summary

With taste- you can somewhat agree that there is some vague, but potentially real primaries. It is pretty hard to actually figure this out. Same guy that came up with the taste pyramid. 6 dimensions of smell- meaningful in describing all the variations in smell. It does mis a lot though- not that great, generally speaking, the amount of molecular homology between compounds that have similar smells is pretty poor. Plot- method called a multi-dimensional scaling- judge diff. compounds on various diff. dimensions and a mathematical procedure collapses the ones that are rated similarly. Two axes- similarity and pleasantness- certain things that have nothing to do with each other, how these things basically line up. Vanilla ends up having a similarity with lemon, on this scale. Big differences in the population, between people and the sexes, on average- women are far superior in detecting and categorizing smells, than men.