Read article here: Nature Neuroscience- 10, 27 - 29 (2006) (Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans | Nature Neuroscience)
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I get:
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The requested URL /neuro/journal/v10/n1/full/nn1819.html was not found on this server.
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Strange. Works fine with me. How about trying this link and do a search on article “nn1819”? Will that help?
Got it.
Thank you.
Interesting article on the ability of people to spatially localise scents. They deal with scent tracking on the ground rather than air plume tracking, but the scent has to go through the air anyway so the relevance to this forum is obvious.
One interesting data point is that as the smellers became trained to follow the scents the frequency of sniffing went up. This should be an easily observable behavior.
Also interesting that the air sampled by each nostril comes from distinct spatial areas. Even a single sniff without head truning gives some directional information.
1:[Nat Neurosci.]
2007 Jan;10(1):27-9. Epub 2006 Dec 17.
Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans.
- Porter J,
- Craven B,
- Khan RM,
- Chang SJ,
- Kang I,
- Judkewicz B,
- Volpe J,
- Settles G,
- Sobel N.
299 Life Science Addition, MC 3200, Program in Biophysics, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Whether mammalian scent-tracking is aided by inter-nostril comparisons is unknown. We assessed this in humans and found that (i) humans can scent-track, (ii) they improve with practice, (iii) the human nostrils sample spatially distinct regions separated by approximately 3.5 cm and, critically, (iv) scent-tracking is aided by inter-nostril comparisons. These findings reveal fundamental mechanisms of scent-tracking and suggest that the poor reputation of human olfaction may reflect, in part, behavioral demands rather than ultimate abilities.
PMID: 17173046 [PubMed - in process]