Odor Memory Performance and Memory Awareness: A Comparison to Word Memory Across Orienting Tasks and Retention Intervals

Odor memory has been argued to exhibit unique characteristics in relation to memory for other types of stimuli such as visually presented words. Two experiments investigated episodic recognition performance as well as memory awareness for odors and words across manipulations of orienting task and retention interval. Orienting task mattered little to odor recognition. However, in contradiction with several previous studies, substantial forgetting of odors was found. After controlling for effects of odor identifiability, it was found that memory for identified odors exhibited greater similarities to memory for words than to memory for unidentified odors