Humans have a stereo sense of smell that subconsciously guides navigation, according to new research from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Humans can smell in stereo. Image credit: Petra Pezibear.
“The human brain exploits subtle differences between the inputs to the paired eyes and ears to construct 3D experiences and navigate the environment. Whether and how it does so for olfaction is unclear,” said study lead author Yuli Wu and his colleagues.
“The human nose, the most protruding part of the face, bears two nostrils that are separated by the nasal septum and inspire air from non-overlapping regions — roughly 3.5 cm apart — in space.”
“Theoretically, this provides a computational advantage to localize odor sources as compared with sampling at one point in space.”
To address whether humans navigate with stereo olfaction, the researchers performed a series of four psychophysical experiments with a total of 180 volunteers.
“We opted to directly examine how binaral concentration disparities of a pure odorant act on motion direction perception,” they explained.
“We took advantage of a unique type of visual stimuli called optic flow, which critically guides navigation and induces the illusory feeling of self-movement in stationary observers.”
“By precisely controlling the expansion pattern of the optic flow, we quantified in a psychophysical procedure the extent to which observers’ heading judgments are influenced by various levels of binaral disparity in the concentration of phenylethyl alcohol, a nontrigeminal rose-like odorant, or vanillin, a non-trigeminal vanilla-like odorant.”
Their results demonstrate that a moderate internostril difference in odor intensity consistently biases recipients’ perceived direction of self-motion toward the higher-concentration side, despite that they cannot report which nostril smells a stronger odor.
“Our work presents clear behavioral evidence that humans have a stereo sense of smell that subconsciously guides navigation,” said Dr. Wen Zhou, senior author of the study.
“The findings underscore the multisensory nature of heading perception and could provide guidance for the design and development of olfactory virtual-reality systems for humans.”
The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Yuli Wu et al. Humans navigate with stereo olfaction. PNAS, published online June 22, 2020; doi: 10.1073/pnas.2004642117
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