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The label that changes a smell's meaning

The labels cheese and body odor prepare people for different experiences. In a study using those labels, people rated the same test smell differently. The chemical stimulus stayed the same; the judgment was sensitive to its description.

3–7 min

Questions you could explore

  • How could an experiment separate the effect of a label from the smell itself?
  • What could brain imaging add to participants' reports of the same labeled odor?

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When a question reshapes a memory

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