A nose without scent: Knowledge of smell in people with congenital anosmia

How do people deprived of a sense conceive the things they cannot experience? Exploring this question in anosmic people is particularly intriguing since olfactory information appears harder to access through language and because people in western countries have a restricted olfactory lexicon compared to other senses. To investigate how people born without the sense of smell conceptualize olfactory information, we asked congenital anosmic participants and matched controls to categorize and sort words with diverse olfactory values across three different tasks (property generation; card sorting; drag and rate. Despite important similarities between congenital anosmic and control people, anosmic individuals nevertheless show some interesting discrepancies on how they think about the value of olfactory words. Our results suggest that congenital anosmic people can develop a deep representation of odors even without ever experiencing them. However, such depiction differs from the one of control people in significant ways, showing how sensory experience partially shapes our mental representation of things.