The effect of odour priming on long latency visual evoked potentials of matching and mismatching objects

This study reports a cross-modal, olfactory/visual event related potential (ERP) using odours as olfactory primes. The results show a difference in the ERP waveform for the N400 waveform when a visual image does not match the priming odour. An N400 peak was produced for both the matched and mismatched conditions but the peaks were significantly more negative for the mismatched condition. By the use of non-food odours this study extends an earlier finding by Grigor, who, using the same ERP paradigm, obtained similar results for food odours and photographs of food.