At a crime scene, the police usually call on eyewitnesses. Could she one day seek the help of “olfactory” witnesses? This is what a study by Professor Mats Olsson, a psychologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, claims. This demonstrates, in the review Frontiers of Psychologythat the human sense of smellis a reliable and effective source when it comes to identifying the perpetrator of a crime.
Until now it was thought that nothing equaled the flair of animals to find the trace of suspects. The sense of smell of humans is indeed commonly perceived as inferior to that of other mammals.
Mats Olsson unravels this assumption and asserts that the human nose is a powerful tool for detecting specific body odor after a traumatic event. His reasoning is based on the fact that the sense of smell is directly linked to the areas of the brain associated with emotion and memory, at the level of the hippocampus and the amydgale.
Successful olfactory identification in 70% of cases
In his experiment, participants watched videos in which people committed violent crimes. This viewing was accompanied by body odor presented as that of the criminals. Then, the volunteers watched neutral films accompanied by the same olfactory process. They were then subjected to a smell test where they had to recognize a criminal from the first video by his body odor among five different male odors. Olfactory identification worked in 70% of cases.
“It worked beyond my expectations, enthused Mats Olsson. What was most interesting is that the participants were much better at remembering and identifying body odor when it involved an emotional environment. “.
Read also: An application that analyzes the smell of our armpits
Unusual: the perfume that leaves a cat smell
Alzheimer’s disease soon detected by the smell of urine
