Olfactory priming leads to faster sound localization.

Cross-modal interactions between vision, audition and touch have been extensively studied in the last decade. However, our understanding of how the chemical senses interact with other sensory modalities remains relatively scarce. We performed a cued auditory localization paradigm in healthy young adults by measuring reaction times to monaural auditory stimuli after subjects had been cued by unilateral olfactory stimuli, mixed olfactory/trigeminal stimuli or somatosensory stimuli. As expected, all cuing conditions led to enhanced performances in auditory localization. Further, both odors led to significantly shorter reaction times when compared to the somatosensory stimuli. We did not observe any effect of side-congruency between the cues and the targets. These results suggest facilitative effects of odorous cues independent of a possible trigeminal component in the interaction between olfaction and audition.