Smell and Tell: The emergence of olfactory expertise in perfumery students

Developing olfactory expertise is essential in professions like perfumery, where the ability to describe, categorize, and conceptualize odors is critical. This study investigates how academic training during a 1.5-year program at a perfumery school (ISIPCA) shapes olfactory expertise of perfumery students. Forty students were assessed at three time points, focusing on odor description, evocation, recognition, discrimination, and categorization tasks. Results show that training significantly enhanced language abilities related to odor description and categorization. Students developed a richer and more precise vocabulary to characterize odors, aligning more closely with expert’s terminology and contributing to the formation of a shared olfactory lexicon. Semantic similarity within and between students, as well as with expert references, increased, emphasizing the importance of consistent language use in expertise development. Advanced natural language processing and machine learning tools revealed that the richness of verbal descriptions and semantic similarity were strong predictors of expertise acquisition. In contrast, improvements in non-verbal tasks, such as odor discrimination and recognition, were more limited, suggesting that perceptual abilities may require more extensive training or specialized methods. Building on these results, we propose potential enhancements to olfactory training including reinforced language practice, mental imagery exercises, and sensory discrimination tasks, along with personalized training strategies. These findings highlight the central role of language in the emergence of olfactory expertise and the importance of computational methods for optimizing training programs and advancing educational practices in olfactory science