THIS WEEK IN BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE
So this week in lab we gave our Web site group presentations. I worked with Stephanie, Julia, and Laura on the olfactory sense. The nose knows! The title of our Web page is "Olfaction--The Forgotten Sense," and has information on many various aspects of olfaction, such as evolution and history, smell disorders, and olfaction and memory. I found a lot of interesting information while investigating olfaction and memory. Much more research has been conducted in areas of memory for visual and auditory information, and many characteristics of olfactory memory remain to be explored. Specifically, storage and decay processes, both aspects of memory stystems, are not yet understood with respect to olfaction. Also, it remains to be discovered whether there exists an olfactory short-term memory. There may be olfactory primacy (in which stimuli presented at the beginning of a trial are remembered best), but research by White and Treisman revealed no significant evidence for olfactory recency (in which stimuli presented at the end of a trial are best remembered). It has been suggested that there is no olfactory recency because recency depends on rehearsal of stimuli, which is a process that may not be available for odors. Most of the existing research on olfaction and memory has involved studies of animals such as the yellow pine chipmunk and Mexican free-tailed bats, both of which are almost as near and dear to every scientist's heart as the fruit fly drosophila melanogaster.
Interested in olfaction?
Come visit our group Web-site; you can get there from the Macalester Behavioral Neuroscience Homepage. While you're there, check out the other Web sites; they're all really interesting and people have put a lot of work into creating them. That's all for now; see you next week.