Panamah
12-17-2006, 07:25 PM
Humans can follow scent trails across a field in the same way that dogs can – and they improve with practice – a intriguing new field study has revealed.
Jess Porter and Noam Sobel at the University of California in Berkeley, US, and colleagues tested whether 32 people were able to follow a 10-metre-long scent trail of chocolate essence through open grass using only their noses. Two-thirds of them could.
I've done this. Sometimes when I would get to work really early I could smell coffee and I'd sniff the trail until I found which brew station it was at.
They then trained four of the subjects three times a day for three days over a two week period to see whether they improved with practice. After training the subjects followed the trail more accurately and at more than double the speed. Watch a human sniffer dog in action (2.1MB, requires QuickTime player).
“Once people realised that they could do this, they seemed to develop a good sense of how to zig-zag their noses back and forth across the odour plume in order to pick up the scent most effectively,” says Porter.
Jess Porter and Noam Sobel at the University of California in Berkeley, US, and colleagues tested whether 32 people were able to follow a 10-metre-long scent trail of chocolate essence through open grass using only their noses. Two-thirds of them could.
I've done this. Sometimes when I would get to work really early I could smell coffee and I'd sniff the trail until I found which brew station it was at.
They then trained four of the subjects three times a day for three days over a two week period to see whether they improved with practice. After training the subjects followed the trail more accurately and at more than double the speed. Watch a human sniffer dog in action (2.1MB, requires QuickTime player).
“Once people realised that they could do this, they seemed to develop a good sense of how to zig-zag their noses back and forth across the odour plume in order to pick up the scent most effectively,” says Porter.