Recognition of common odors, pictures, and simple shapes

Abstract

Recognition of common odors and simple shapes decayed in a similar manner over the course of 4 months. Recognition of complex pictures was uniformly higher than recognition of the odors and simple figures, although the distractors for these stimuli were much less similar than for the odors or simple shapes. Recognition of these common odors was the same as recognition performance on single chemicals used in previous studies. These results suggest that simple chemicals and complex familiar odors are encoded or remembered in a similar fashion, and that visual stimuli exist which are encoded in a similar manner to odors, possibly as unitary images with few features. © 1978 Psychonomic Society, Inc.