Nosenography

Nosenography is a theoretical and methodological commitment to uncover the presences and practices of smell, an often-ignored sensory feature of market and consumption spaces. Drawing on prior social science theorizations of smell as well as contemporary sensory marketing practices, we develop a framework to understand how smell features in spatial assemblages of bodies, locations and experiences. Extending theorizations of product smells and ambient smells, we show how this framework can guide knowledge of the sensing, practice and management of smell and space. We explain that smell is a dynamic and unruly force that (i) encodes spaces with meaning, (ii) identifies bodies with spaces, and (iii) punctuates the temporal experience of space as it changes. Nosenography reaffirms that spaces of consumption are multisensory and that this quality should be further acknowledged in figuring market spaces as dynamic and contested assemblages of heterogeneous constituents.

Decoding stimulus features in primate somatosensory cortex during perceptual categorization

Neurons of the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) respond as functions of frequency or amplitude of a vibrotactile stimulus. However, whether S1 neurons encode both frequency and amplitude of the vibrotactile stimulus or whether each sensory feature is encoded by separate populations of S1 neurons is not known, To further address these questions, we recorded S1 neurons while trained monkeys categorized only one sensory feature of the vibrotactile stimulus: frequency, amplitude, or duration. The results suggest a hierarchical encoding scheme in S1: from neurons that encode all sensory features of the vibrotactile stimulus to neurons that encode only one sensory feature. We hypothesize that the dynamic representation of each sensory feature in S1 might serve for further downstream processing that leads to the monkey’s psychophysical behavior observed in these tasks.

Crossmodal correspondences, crossmodal completion and crossmodal imagery

Crossmodal correspondences can be defined as tendency to match a sensory feature/dimension, either presented or imagined, to another sensory feature/dimension, either presented or imagined, in another modality. They start to be documented across all modalities (see Spence, 2011 for a review) but both their etiology and role remain to be explored. Crossmodal correspondences, such as those holding between auditory pitch and visual brightness or size have been showed to exert an influence on multisensory perception when two congruent cues are presented together (e.g., Parise and Spence, 2008, 2009). Here, following the framework exposed in Spence and Deroy (in press), I show that crossmodal correspondences can also play two others roles, that is in crossmodal completion and in crossmodal imagery. As such, crossmodal correspondences can explain phenomena such as silent-lip reading or certain aspects of musical imagery that other models want to attribute either to ubiquituous synaesthetic effects (Ward, 2011) or emotional congruence (Palmer et al., 2011).