Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM)

In the field of human olfactory perception, three main aspects are usually considered: sensitivity, discrimination performance and identification ability.

. Sensitivity is defined as the lowest concentration of a given odorant that can be detected.

. Discrimination performance is referred to as the ability to distinguish a specific odorant from one or several other odorants of equal subjective intensity.

. Identification ability is defined as the ability to correctly assign a name to a given odorant.

It is widely believed that human females are superior to males in their olfactory abilities. However, a superior performance of females relative to males with regard to olfactory sensitivity and odor discrimination has only rarely been found, whereas sex differences in odor identification in favor of females have been shown more frequently. 

From an evolutionary perspective our human ancestors can be considered as prey species to large predators. Several studies suggest that olfactory sensitivity of mammalian prey species could be particularly high for predator odorants compared to other types of odorants.

Chemo-analytical studies have identified a number of odorants that are characteristic of the urine or faeces or scent-gland secretions of mammalian predators and behavioral assays have shown that prey species respond appropriately to these odorants alone. However, very little is known about the olfactory sensitivity of human subjects for such predator odorants.

It was therefore the aim of the present study to determine olfactory detection thresholds in human subjects for compounds known to be typical predator odorants and to compare the present threshold data to those obtained in spider monkeys.