Evidence from odor similarity judgments suggests a widespread ability to imagine odors.

Abstract

A persistent belief holds that humans can imagine visual content but not odors. While visual imagery is regarded as recreating a perceptual representation, it is unknown whether olfactory mental imagery shares a perceptual format. Visual imagery studies have demonstrated this perceptual formatting using distance and shape similarity judgments, whereas olfactory studies often use single-odor vividness ratings, complicating the establishment of perceptual formatting for odors. Using odor pair similarity scores from two experiments (odor-based: 8,880 ratings from 37 participants, including 20 women; label-based: 129,472 ratings from 2,023 participants, including 1,164 women), we observed a strong correlation (r = .71) between odor-based and label-based odor pairs. The correlation was unaffected by gender and age and was present in a wide range of self-perceived olfactory functions. Pleasantness similarity was the main determinant of overall similarity for both odor-based (r = -.63) and label-based (r = -.45) odor pairs. We then used a large language model to derive semantic similarity scores for the labels of all odor pairs. Semantic similarity only mediated a small part of the observed correlation, further supporting our conclusions that odor imagery shares a perceptual formatting with vision, that odor percepts may be elicited from verbal labels alone, and that odor pair pleasantness may be a dominant and accessible feature in this regard. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).