Enhanced Odorant Localization Abilities in Congenitally Blind but not in Late-Blind Individuals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although often considered a nondominant sense for spatial perception, chemosensory perception can be used to localize the source of an event and potentially help us navigate through our environment. Would blind people who lack the dominant spatial sense-vision-develop enhanced spatial chemosensation or suffer from the lack of visual calibration on spatial chemosensory perception? To investigate this question, we tested odorant localization abilities across nostrils in blind people compared to sighted controls and if the time of vision loss onset modulates those abilities. We observed that congenitally blind individuals (10 subjects) outperformed sighted (20 subjects) and late-blind subjects (10 subjects) in a birhinal localization task using mixed olfactory-trigeminal stimuli. This advantage in congenitally blind people was selective to olfactory localization but not observed for odorant detection or identification. We, therefore, showed that congenital blindness but not blindness acquired late in life is linked to enhanced localization of chemosensory stimuli across nostrils, most probably of the trigeminal component. In addition to previous studies highlighting enhanced localization abilities in auditory and tactile modalities, our current results extend such enhanced abilities to chemosensory localization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".