Categorizing Smells: A Localist Approach

Humans are poorer at identifying smells and communicating about them, compared to other sensory domains. They also cannot easily organize odor sensations in a general conceptual space, where geometric distance could represent how similar or different all odors are. These two generalities more less accepted by psychologists, they often seen as connected: If there is no space for odors, then olfactory identification should indeed be poor. We propose here an important revision this conclusion: believe that the claim true only if one means representing possible sensations, paradigmatic sense used instance color. However, sense, local spaces given subset of do exist. Thus absence global does not warrant conclusion map all. Here we show localist account provides new interpretation experts cross-cultural categorization studies: Rather than being exceptions poor communication usually elsewhere, taken corroborate existence spaces.