Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although people are poor at naming odors, naming a smell helps to remember that odor. Previous studies show wine experts have better memory for smells, and they also name wine and wine-related smells differently than novices. This leads us to ask whether wine experts’ odor memory is verbally mediated? In addition, does the odor memory advantage that experts have over novices generalize to all odors, or is it restricted to odors in their domain of expertise? Twenty-four wine experts and 24 novices smelled wines, wine-related odors and common odors, and were asked to remember these. Critically, half of the participants were asked to name the smells in addition to memorizing them, while the other half just remembered the smells. Wine experts had better memory for wines, but not for wine-related or common odors, indicating their memory is restricted to odors from their domain of expertise. Wine experts were also found to be more consistent and accurate than novices in their descriptions. But there was no relationship between experts’ ability to name odors and their memory for odors. This suggests experts’ odor memory advantage is not linguistically mediated, but may be the result of differential perceptual learning.