Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 May;41(7):1904-1919.
doi: 10.1002/hbm.24920. Epub 2020 Jan 6.

Human body odor increases familiarity for faces during encoding-retrieval task

Cinzia Cecchetto  1   2 , Florian Ph S Fischmeister  1 , Sarah Gorkiewicz  1 , Wolfgang Schuehly  3 , Deepika Bagga  1   2 , Valentina Parma  4 , Veronika Schöpf  1   2   5
Affiliations

Human body odor increases familiarity for faces during encoding-retrieval task

Cinzia Cecchetto et al. Hum Brain Mapp. 2020 May.

Abstract

Odors can increase memory performance when presented as context during both encoding and retrieval phases. Since information from different sensory modalities is integrated into a unified conceptual knowledge, we hypothesize that the social information from body odors and faces would be integrated during encoding. The integration of such social information would enhance retrieval more so than when the encoding occurs in the context of common odors. To examine this hypothesis and to further explore the underlying neural correlates of this behavior, we have conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in which participants performed an encoding-retrieval memory task for faces during the presentation of common odor, body odor or clean air. At the behavioral level, results show that participants were less biased and faster in recognizing faces when presented in concomitance with the body odor compared to the common odor. At the neural level, the encoding of faces in the body odor condition, compared to common odor and clean air conditions, showed greater activation in areas related to associative memory (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), odor perception and multisensory integration (orbitofrontal cortex). These results suggest that face and body odor information were integrated and as a result, participants were faster in recognizing previously presented material.

Keywords: body odors; chemosignals; context-dependent memory; encoding-retrieval face; episodic memory; fMRI; olfaction.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(a) Overview of the study procedures with odor presentation per block and study group. BO, congruent group exposed to masked body odor; I‐BO, incongruent group exposed to the masked body odor; MASK, congruent group exposed to the masker odor. (b) Stimulus timing for encoding and recognition task. Inter‐stimulus intervals were jittered as shown (duration 2.5–7.5 s). During the encoding task, participants evaluated whether the color of the eyes of each face was dark (index finger), light (ring finger) or a mixed color (middle finger button press). During the recognition task, participants evaluated by button press whether or not they had previously seen the face in the encoding task (yes = index finger, no = ring finger)
Figure 2
Figure 2
Mean values per congruent groups and odor and air blocks of (a) bias, (b) reaction time of the hits, and (c) reaction times of the false alarms. Error bars represent SEM
Figure 3
Figure 3
Brain activation maps showing significant cluster of activation for the encoding phase. Statistical maps are derived with a threshold of p < .05 FWE corrected and superimposed on a standard T1 template. Red areas = significant cluster of activation; green areas = piriform cortex activation previously reported in the literature on a meta‐analysis of olfactory studies (Seubert, Freiherr, Frasnelli, et al., 2013); yellow areas = overlap between cluster of activation and piriform cortex activation. BO, congruent group exposed to masked body odor; MASK, congruent group exposed to the masker odor
Figure 4
Figure 4
Brain activation maps showing significant cluster of activation for the recognition phase. Statistical maps are derived with a threshold of p < .05 FWE corrected and superimposed on a standard T1 template. BO, congruent group exposed to masked body odor; I‐BO, incongruent group exposed to the masked body odor
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Avants, B. B. , Epstein, C. L. , Grossman, M. , & Geea, J. C. (2008). Symmetric diffeomorphic image registration with cross‐correlation: Evaluating automated labeling of elderly and neurodegenerative brain. Medical Image Analysis, 12, 26–41. 10.1016/J.MEDIA.2007.06.004 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Ball, L. J. , Shoker, J. , & Miles, J. N. V. (2010). Odour‐based context reinstatement effects with indirect measures of memory: The curious case of rosemary. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 655–678. 10.1348/000712609X479663 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Beck, A. , Steer, R. , & Brown, G. (1996). Beck Depression Inventory‐II. San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation; 10.1037/t00742-000 - DOI
    1. Beck, A. , Steer, R. , & Hautzinger, M. (1995). Beck‐Depressions‐Inventar (2. Auflage). Bern, Switzerland: Huber.
    1. Belin, P. (2017). Similarities in face and voice cerebral processing. Visual Cognition, 25, 658–665.

Publication types