The Effect of Olfactory Training On Sensory Perception

The Effect of Olfactory Training on
Sensory Perception
Youness Hourri
hourri@yahoo.com
Final Study Report for the Master’s Degree in Data Science from
the Faculty of Sciences of Fez and the Galilée Institute in Paris
Defended on July 07, 2023, in Lyon
Internship Supervisor :
Dr. Anne-Lise Saive Jury Members :
anne-lise.saive@institutpaulbocuse.com Prof. Ali Yahyaouy
Dr. Anne-Lise Saive
Academic Advisor : Prof. Dounia El Bourakadi
Prof. Khalid El Fazazy Prof. Khalid El Fazazy
khalid.elfazazy@usmba.ac.ma
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank Allah the Almighty, the Most Gracious,
and the Most Merciful for His blessings during my study and in completing this work.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Anne-Lise Saive, my supervisor, for
her unfailing support and valuable advice throughout my internship. Her ideas and
guidance have played an essential role in shaping my understanding of the research
process.
In addition, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Pr. Khalid El Fazazy

for his invaluable help with machine learning and his expert comments that have
significantly improved the quality of my work.
Moreover, I would like to thank the teachers and professors at the University of Fez
and the University of Paris for their invaluable contributions to our academic jour-
ney. Their passion for teaching, expertise in their respective fields, and unwavering
support have played a pivotal role in shaping our knowledge and skills.
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the staff at LYFE Institute for
their warm welcome and support during my internship. Their kindness, guidance,
and expertise have greatly contributed to my professional growth. Thank you for
making my experience truly memorable and rewarding.
My ultimate thanks are dedicated to my beloved parents for their endless support,
love, and prayers. I also would like to thank my brother and sisters who have given
me plentiful help and support in completing this work. Also, huge thanks go to my
colleagues in the computer science department for every single moment of joy and
sorrow we cherished together since the first time we stepped into our campus up to
this very second.
Finally, I would like to express my thanks to all my friends and all persons who
helped me in completing this work whose names cannot be mentioned one by one
for their help and support.
List of Figures
1 Institut Lyfe (Lyon for Excellence) Logo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2 Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de
l’Aromatique Alimentaire Logo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3 Brain plasticity : changes in the cerebral cortex and neuronal struc-
ture and function that occur after regular practice. . . . . . . . . . . 10
4 Description strategies used by coffee experts, wine experts and novices 12
5 Overview of the olfactory experiment, showing the four sessions and
five types of tests conducted, including evocation, description, cate-
gorization of odors, difference, and memory tests. . . . . . . . . . . . 14
6 A screenshot of the Google Colab platform interface with similarity
measure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
7 A screenshot of the jamovi software interface with a two-way ANOVA
analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
8 A schema illustrating the steps involved in text preprocessing. . . . . 19
9 Cosine similarity for vector space models. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
10 Clustering example with kMeans (left) and Mean shift (right). These
two clusterings have an adjusted Rand index of 94% . . . . . . . . . . 23
11 An example of calculating Rand Index between two partitions . . . . 24
12 Linear Relationships between Words from developers.google.com . . . 25
13 Architectural comparison of CBOW and Skip-gram models for word
representation learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
14 Skip-gram paradigm example demonstrates how to predict context
using a single word. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
15 Co-occurrence matrix for three sentences with two words as context. . 28
16 Conceptual model for the GloVe model’s implementation from to-
wardsdatascience.com. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
17 Diagram of a transformer architecture, showing the encoder and de-
coder components with self-attention layers and multi-head attention
mechanisms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
18 Scaled dot-product attention mechanism. Queries, keys, and values
are input into the attention mechanism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
19 Multi-head attention mechanism. Queries, keys, and values are lin-
early projected multiple times. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
20 Comparison of PCA (on the left) and t-SNE (on the right) on 5000
samples from the MNIST handwritten digit dataset (from ml-lectures.org). 36
21 Average number of answers given per group and per measurement
time for the description task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
22 Frequency of the words most used by the ISIPCA group for the de-
scription task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
23 Frequency of the words most used by the control group for the de-
scription task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
24 Number of words used from the vocabulary selected (40% of the most
frequent words) by the ISIPCA group. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
25 Evolution of the use of adjectives (on the left) and nouns (on the
right) over time at ISIPCA students. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
26 Visualization of participant responses in 2D space using PCA for the
description task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
27 Visualization of participant responses in 2D space using TSNE for
the description task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
28 Graph illustrating the evolution of intra-subject cosine similarity over
time using FlauBERT for the description task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
29 Graph showing the evolution of intra-subject Euclidean distance over
time using FlauBERT for the description task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
30 Evolution of the average number of words used over time for the
ISIPCA group and the control group for the evocation task. . . . . . 44
31 Frequency of the words most used by the ISIPCA group for the evo-
cation task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
32 Frequency of the words most used by the control group for the evo-
cation task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
33 Evolution of the number of words used by the ISIPCA group during
the sensory evocation task using a vocabulary based on the most
frequently used words. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
34 Evolution of the use of grammatical categories by the ISIPCA group
during the sensory evocation task at the different tenses (T0, T1 and
T2). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
35 Scatterplot of responses used by the ISIPCA group and the control
group during the sensory evocation task using PCA. . . . . . . . . . . 48
36 Scatterplot of responses used by the ISIPCA and control group for
the sensory evocation task, generated using t-SNE. . . . . . . . . . . 49
37 Graph showing the evolution of intra-subject Euclidean distance over
time using FlauBERT for the evocation task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
38 Average number of groups formed by participants over time for the
ISIPCA and Control groups. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
39 Rand coefficient between the reference score and the participants’
scores. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
40 Adjusted Rand coefficient between the reference partition and the
participants’ partitions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
41 Cohen’s Kappa between the reference score and the participants’ scores. 52
List of Tables
1 Description of different products used in evocation and description
tasks provided by a perfume expert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2 Composition of different fragrance ingredients used in categorization
task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3 An example of a data snippet for the similarity measure using Sen-
tenceBERT as an input for ANOVA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Contents
1 Introduction 7
1.1 Institut Lyfe Research & Innovation Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2 L’Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de
l’Aromatique Alimentaire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.3 Background on brain plasticity and olfactory expertise . . . . . . . . 8
1.4 Research objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2 Experiments & materials 14

2.1 Study design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.1.1 Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.1.2 Measurement time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.1.3 Products . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.2 Data analysis tools and libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2.1 Softwares & tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2.2 Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3 Analysis methodology 19
3.1 Data preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.2 Mathematical approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.2.1 Quantitative analysis & descriptive statistics . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.2.2 Cosine similarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.2.3 Repeated measures ANOVA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.2.4 Cohen’s kappa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.2.5 Rand index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.3 Machine learning tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.3.1 Word embedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.3.2 Word2Vec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.3.3 GloVe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.3.4 Transformers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.3.5 Principal component analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.3.6 t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding . . . . . . . . . . 34
4 Results 37
4.1 Description task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4.1.1 Richness of vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4.1.2 Grammatical tagging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
4.1.3 Intra-subject similarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.2 Evocation task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.2.1 Diversity of words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.2.2 Grammatical tagging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.2.3 Intra-subject semantic distance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.3 Categorization task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4.3.1 Number of groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4.3.2 Agreement measure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
5 Discussion 53
5.1 Description task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
5.2 Evocation Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
5.3 Categorization Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
1 Introduction
1 Introduction
1.1 Institut Lyfe Research & Innovation Center
Inspired by two visionaries, Paul Bocuse and Gérard Pélisson, Institut Lyfe (formerly
Institut Paul Bocuse) is a higher education institution dedicated to the transmission
of exceptional know-how in the hotel and restaurant trades. Since 1990, the Institute
has been the repository of a cultural heritage and the art of French hospitality at
their highest levels of excellence. Its research center, created in 2008, conducts
multidisciplinary scientific research on the food transition, recognized in France
and internationally. Its mission is to meet the challenge of a tasty, healthy and
sustainable food for all and in all contexts of meals or hospitality.
Figure 1: Institut Lyfe (Lyon for Excellence) Logo.
As a unique research center within the higher schools of hospitality and catering, it
plays an active role in the evolution of culinary practices and restaurant manage-
ment. The knowledge produced by the research center nourishes the pedagogy of
Institut Lyfe, thus forming the responsible leaders of tomorrow, capable of facing
the societal challenges of sectors in constant evolution. The research center has more
than 20 researchers divided into three key research areas:
• Cognitive Sciences (where I did my internship) look at food perception and
cognition. They study how our senses interact with food, how we perceive it,
and how these perceptions influence our food preferences and behaviors.
• Social Sciences explore food cultures and transitions, examining how eating
habits evolve over time and how they influence our food choices.
• Nutrition and Eating Behavior focus on food, nutrition, and health. These
researchers explore the links between diet and health, studying nutrients, eat-
ing patterns, and their impacts on our well-being.
Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 7

1 Introduction
Thanks to these interconnected research areas, Institut Lyfe Research & Innovation
Center contributes to the advancement of knowledge and innovation in the field of
food transition, thus making a valuable contribution to the training of tomorrow’s
professionals and society as a whole.
1.2 L’Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cos-

métique et de l’Aromatique Alimentaire
L’Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de l’Aromatique
Alimentaire (ISIPCA) is a renowned institution specialized in training and research
in the fields of perfumery, cosmetics, and food aromatics.
Figure 2: Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de

l’Aromatique Alimentaire Logo.
Located in Paris, France, ISIPCA is recognized as a leader in the perfume and

cosmetics industry. The school offers a full range of high-quality higher education
and vocational training programs. Their curricula cover various fields, such as per-
fumery, perfume creation, olfactory marketing, cosmetology, cosmetic formulation,
sensory evaluation and perfume and cosmetics value chain management.
Thanks to their expertise and their close relationships with the industry, ISIPCA
offers unique opportunities to students, in particular internships within prestigious
companies. Their commitment to academic excellence and their strong professional
network make ISIPCA an ideal partner for my final internship.
By collaborating with ISIPCA as a sponsor for my project, I was able to benefit
from their expertise in the fields of perfumery and cosmetics. ISIPCA provided me
with data on which I was able to perform preprocessing and analyses. They also
proposed some statistical methods to which I worked.
1.3 Background on brain plasticity and olfactory expertise

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born into poverty and endowed with an exceptional
olfactory sense, he devotes himself to the quest for the ideal perfume, capable of

1 Introduction
arousing love and admiration. For this, he does not hesitate to kill young women
whose fragrant essence he captures.
Grenouille is the protagonist of the novel The Perfume by Patrick Süskind, pub-
lished in 1985. The novel describes with great finesse his ability to perceive odors,
which allows him to distinguish the slightest nuances and the slightest variations of
the scents that surround him. Thus, he can identify the ingredients of a perfume,
recognize the emotions and intentions of people, or even blend into his environment
by masking his smell. Perfume becomes for him a language, an expression of his
genius and his madness.
Neuroplasticity, also referred to as brain or neural plasticity, is the brain’s capacity
to change and adapt in response to new experiences or behaviors[1]. This process
involves the growth and reorganization of neural networks in the brain, allowing it
to be rewired to function differently from how it previously functioned.
It was once believed that neuroplasticity only occurred during childhood, but re-
search [2] has shown that many aspects of the brain can be altered even through
adulthood. However, the developing brain exhibits a higher degree of plasticity than
the adult brain. Activity-dependent plasticity can have significant implications for
healthy development, learning, and memory.
The mechanisms of neuroplasticity are numerous and complex. They involve the
formation of new synapses, the modification of the properties of existing synapses,
and the regulation of gene expression. These changes range from individual neuron
pathways making new connections to systematic remapping [3, 4]. Neuroplasticity
allows neurons to adapt to new situations. It is a powerful tool for adaptation.
Regular training can induce changes in behavior, the cerebral cortex1 , and neurons
as shown in Figure 3 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesiology]. In fact, regular
practice of a specific task can lead to measurable improvements in behavior, such
as better accuracy or faster execution [1, 5]. These improvements are linked to
structural changes in the cerebral cortex, including increased neuronal density in
the regions associated with the task practiced [6]. At the neuronal level, regular
training strengthens existing neural connections and promotes the formation of new
connections [7]. These changes are often associated with an increase in synaptic plas-
ticity, allowing better information transmission and optimization of neural circuits
involved in the practiced task.
In musicians, musical practice can lead to changes in the structure and function of the
brain. For example, a study has shown that musicians have a higher density of gray
matter in certain regions of the brain involved in auditory information processing
and motor coordination [8]. Likewise, the practice of a sport can also lead to changes
in the structure and function of the brain. For example, a study has shown that
1
The cerebral cortex is an organic tissue, called gray matter, covering both hemispheres of
the brain. It is the seat of the most advanced neurological functions, such as language, memory,
consciousness

1 Introduction
Figure 3: Brain plasticity : changes in the cerebral cortex and neuronal structure
and function that occur after regular practice.
athletes have a greater density of gray matter in certain regions of the brain involved
in the processing of visual and spatial information [9, 10].
Brain plasticity can be induced by a variety of stimuli, such as learning, physical
exercise, and sensory stimulation [11, 12]. The resulting changes in brain structure
and function can be observed at different levels, ranging from molecular and cellular
changes to changes in neural networks and brain regions [13]. For example, learning
a new skill can lead to changes in gray matter density in certain regions of the
brain [14]. Similarly, regular physical exercise can lead to changes in brain structure
and function that are associated with improved cognition [15, 14].
Perfumers are professionals specialized in the creation of perfumes. Their job is
to compose combinations of smells that create unique sensory experiences. The
creation of a complex perfume requires a thorough understanding of the different
olfactory notes, their interactions and their combinations.
The regular practice of identifying and composing different aromas can cause changes
in the brain of perfumers, especially in the regions associated with olfactory percep-
tion [16, 17]. Scientific studies have shown that olfactory experts, such as perfumers,
have differences in their brain activity and in the functional connectivity between
olfactory regions compared to non-expert individuals [18, 19].
The training and experience of perfumers can improve their sensitivity to odors and
their ability to discriminate and identify different olfactory notes. These skills can
be supported by neural plasticity mechanisms, such as the creation of new synaptic
connections between neurons or the strengthening of existing connects [20].

1 Introduction
It should be noted that neural plasticity is a complex process that can be influenced
by various factors, including age, level of expertise, motivation and environment [21,
22]. Experienced perfumers, who have dedicated many years to refining their sense
of smell and their skills in composition, may have specific brain adaptations that
facilitate their work [16].
This paper [23] shows how naive subjects find it difficult to describe smells due
to a lack of vocabulary. However, this difficulty can be used to explore the re-
lationship between language and sensory perception. Experts can overcome this
problem through learning, training, and regular practice. Analyzing professional
speech about odors can help to understand how experts use language to describe
their sensory experience.
The olfaction is characterized by a prominent hedonic dimension. Previous study [24]
have shown that these affective responses to odors are modulated by physicochemi-
cal, physiological and cognitive factors. This study examined the influence of exper-
tise on the treatment of pleasant and unpleasant odors both at the perceptual and
verbal level. To do this, the performances of two olfactory tasks were compared be-
tween novices, cooks in training and experts (perfumers and aroma specialists): the
members of all the groups evaluated the intensity and the agreeableness of pleasant
and unpleasant odors (perceptual tasks). They were also asked to describe each of
the 20 odorants as precisely as possible (verbal description task). At the perceptual
level, the results revealed that there were no group-related differences in hedonic
evaluations of unpleasant and pleasant odors. At the verbal level, the descriptions
of odors were richer (for example, chemical terms, olfactory qualities, and olfactory
sources) and did not refer to approval among experts compared to untrained subjects
who used terms that refer to sources of odors (for example, sweets) accompanied by
terms that refer to the hedonics of odors.
In a study [25], coffee and wine experts were compared to novices for their ability to
describe the smells and flavors of coffee, wine, and the everyday smells and tastes.
The results showed that wine experts were more consistent in describing the smells
and flavors of wine than coffee experts and novices, but coffee experts were not
more consistent in describing coffee. Neither of the expert groups was more precise
in identifying everyday smells or tastes. In their descriptions of their own areas of
expertise, experts tend to use source-based terms (such as vanilla), while novices
tend to use evaluative terms (such as pleasant). However, the overall language
strategies of the two groups were similar as shown in Figure 4.
Experts can describe scents by using specific terms to describe the different olfac-
tory notes that make up a scent. For example, they may use terms such as "floral",
"fruity", "spicy" or "woody" to describe the different notes in a scent. Experts may
also use more technical terms to describe scents, such as "pyrazine" or "terpene",
which refer to specific chemical compounds present in the scent. Furthermore, ex-
perts may use metaphors to describe odors, such as "the smell of rain" or "the smell
of the sea," which evoke specific sensory associations.

1 Introduction
Figure 4: Description strategies used by coffee experts, wine experts and novices
Olfactory expertise is the ability to identify, describe, and evaluate odors. It is

based on sensory skills, but also on specific knowledge and vocabulary. Olfactory
experts use a codified and shared language to communicate about smells, which
allows them to categorize them, compare them, and associate them with cultural
references. Language therefore plays an essential role in olfactory expertise, but
it also presents limits and challenges, in particular to translate olfactory sensations
into words and to account for the subjectivity and emotion related to smells [23, 25].
1.4 Research objectives

The present work is part of the NeurONA project, an innovative study conducted
by the ISIPCA perfumery school. The NeurONA project aims to characterize the
effects of a two-year olfactory training on odor perception and memory abilities in
the perfumery students.
The main objective of this project is to better understand how olfactory training
influences sensory perception and memory, in order to improve knowledge on the
cognitive mechanisms of olfactory learning. This will also help guide the evolution
of pedagogy in teaching olfactory knowledge to future olfactory professionals.
As part of the NeurONA project, we applied five types of tests to assess participants
and examine the effects of olfactory learning on sensory perception and memory;
• The evocation test involved asking the participants to share their sponta-
neous associations and thoughts when smelling the odors. They were encour-
aged to describe what the odors reminded them of and the words that came
to their mind. Hypothesis : compared to a control population, the students

1 Introduction
will be less in evocation and more in description.

• The description test was aimed at obtaining detailed descriptions of the
odors perceived by the participants. They were asked to use accurate and de-
scriptive language to convey the features and qualities of the odors. Hypothesis
: with the training, the students will describe the products better (more terms
generated with the more precise verbatim).
• The difference test to assess the participants’ ability to detect subtle differ-
ences between odors. The participants had to smell three different fragrances
and determine which one was different from the others. Hypothesis : with the
training, ISIPCA students will improve their discrimination performance.
• The memory test was designed to evaluate the visual and olfactory mem-
ory of the participants. They had to memorize a set of images and smells,
then recognize and match them correctly when presented again. Hypothesis :
increase in memory capacity in perfumery students.
• The categorization test consisted of asking the participants to group the
olfactory products according to predefined categories. This task allowed us to
evaluate their ability to use their understanding of the characteristics and simi-
larities between the odors to perform the appropriate categorization. Hypothesis
: make groups according to the categories and subcategories that they learn
during their training. They manage to describe their categories better with
learning.
The purpose of this work is to focus on the evocation, description, and categorization
tests, which we will describe in detail in the next section, and present the results
and implications of our analysis. These tests provided a diversity of data that were
collected and used for in-depth statistical analyses and machine learning techniques.
In this work, we aim to answer the following questions:
• How does olfactory learning affect the language (or verbalisation) of appren-
tices about smells?
• Over the duration of a two-year olfactory training program for perfumery
students, how do their abilities to evoke, describe, and categorize scents evolve?
• How does olfactory training influence odor grouping?

2 Experiments & materials

2.1 Study design
The olfactory experiment consisted of four sessions of questionnaire tests. Psycho-
physical tests assessed the way that participants evoke and describe odors and their
capacity for memorizing, categorizing, and identifying small differences between
odors, using standardized stimuli coded on 3 digits.
Figure 5: Overview of the olfactory experiment, showing the four sessions and five
types of tests conducted, including evocation, description, categorization of odors,
difference, and memory tests.
2.1.1 Participants
This study focused on the olfactory responses of 55 participants, including 48 women
and 7 men, aged 18.47 years ± 1.15 (mean ± standard deviation), who participated
in an olfactory experiment between 2018 and 2021. Among these participants, 40
were students from the ISIPCA school, which we considered as the target group,
and 15 were control students from the Sup’Biotech school2 .
One key difference between the two groups of participants in this study is their level
of olfactory training. The ISIPCA group, which was considered as the target group,
consisted of students who had undergone precise and specialized olfactory training
for 2 years. In contrast, the Sup’Biotech group, which served as the control group,
consisted of students who had not received any formal training in smells, aromas,
or other aspects of olfaction.
2.1.2 Measurement time

The subjects participated at different measurement times, such that the target group
(ISIPCA students) participated at 3 measurement times T0 (first experiment), T1
2
Sup’Biotech is an engineering school specialized in biotechnology that offers training in the
fields of health, pharmacy, energy, the environment, food and cosmetics.

(after 6 months from T0) and T2 (after 6 months from T1). And for the con-
trol group (Sup’BioTech students) participated only at two measurement times T0
(first experiment) and T2 (after 12 months from T0). For all the tasks in question
(evocation, description and categorization).
2.1.3 Products
The evocation and description tasks were carried out with 12 different odors
in Table 1, representing taxonomic categories (e.g., fruits, flowers) and functional
categories (e.g., edible, bad smell). Each participant had to evoke and describe the
odors they smelled, without having access to visual or auditory cues. Two random
odors were selected from the 12 for each participant, in order to vary the stimuli
and avoid habituation effects (the same odors were used for all three measurement
times).
During the experiment, the participants were given one minute to smell and write
about each product, which was contained in a bottle coded with 3 digits. Two types
of questions were asked:
• For the evocation test, participants were asked: “What comes spontaneously
to your mind when you smell this product?”
• For the free description test, participants were asked: “How would you objec-
tively describe this product?”
Table 1: Description of different products used in evocation and description tasks
provided by a perfume expert.
Code Description
282 herbe - végétale
764 arbre - pin grillé
204 médicament - fleur tubéreuse
590 fruit - prune
516 floral - lilas
925 nettoyant - pin des landes
946 orange
126 feu de bois
529 cèdre
587 bergamote verte
673 figue
366 poubelle
The categorization task was an important part of the olfactory experiment, de-
signed to assess the participants’ ability to group and describe different odors. For
this task, 15 different odors were used, as listed in Table 2. Each participant was
presented with all of the products and asked to form groups based on their sim-
ilarities. After forming the groups, participants were then asked to describe each

group by providing descriptive terms that captured the common characteristics of

the odors within that group.
Table 2: Composition of different fragrance ingredients used in categorization task.
Code Composition
145 Cacao
236 Fève Tonka
371 Genêt
452 Foin
593 Huile essentielle laurier noble
614 Huile essentielle sauge sclarée
728 Parmanthème
867 Mimosa
989 Tabac
54 Café
190 Huile essentielle bois de gaïac
277 Polysantol
312 Diacetyl
423/509 Glycolierral
2.2 Data analysis tools and libraries

During my internship, I had access to a wide range of tools and libraries for carrying
out my projects. Using this set of tools, libraries, and approaches, I was able to
complete my projects, analyze the data in depth, and obtain significant results.
Developing my skills and achieving my internship objectives were made possible by
a learning and innovation-friendly work environment in which I evolved.
2.2.1 Softwares & tools

In order to build my Python projects, I used Google Colab (Figure 6), a free version
of the Google development platform. The online platform allows me to code, col-
laborate with my supervisors and access powerful resources, such as GPUs. Google
Colab was easy to use and compatible with popular libraries like SeaBorn, scikit-
learn and, Pandas for data analysis, as well as NLTK, spaCy and, transformers for
natural language processing, which made completing projects easier.
As for statistical analysis, I used two main software programs: RStudio and Jamovi.
RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) specially designed for
the R programming language. Thanks to its advanced features, such as package
management, debugging, and data visualization, I was able to perform complex
statistical analyzes efficiently and accurately. I also used Jamovi (Figure 7), a user-
friendly open-source software that offers an intuitive graphical interface to perform
statistical analyzes and produce data visualizations. His visual approach allowed

Figure 6: A screenshot of the Google Colab platform interface with similarity

measure.
me to quickly understand the results of my analyzes and to present them in a clear

and concise way.
2.2.2 Libraries
I have had the opportunity to explore and use different techniques for manipulating
and processing tabular data, as well as for cleaning and normalizing text. I will
present the main libraries and tools I used in this context.
To manipulate and process tabular data, I mainly have the Pandas library. which is
a powerful and flexible tool that allows to easily manipulate structured data. Thanks
to its data structures, especially DataFrames, I was able to perform operations such
as selecting, filtering, aggregating and merging data, as well as computing statistics
and transforming columns.
For text cleaning and normalization, I exploited several libraries, namely Spacy,
Stanza and NLTK. Spacy and Stanza are natural language processing (NLP) li-
braries that provide advanced features for text processing, such as tokenization,
grammar labeling, named entity extraction, and lemmatization. NLTK (Natural
Language Toolkit) is a popular NLP library that provides a wide range of tools for
cleaning, normalizing, and parsing text. I used these libraries to perform operations
such as stopword removal, word normalization and polarity detection.

Figure 7: A screenshot of the jamovi software interface with a two-way ANOVA

analysis.
I also used the Matplotlib and Seaborn libraries for data visualization. Matplotlib
is a very flexible data visualization library that allows you to create a wide variety
of custom graphs and visualizations. Seaborn is a Matplotlib-based library that
provides additional functionality for creating attractive and informative statistical
graphs. I used these libraries to graph tabular data and results of my analyses.
In terms of using pre-trained models, I used the Gensim library. which is an NLP
library that specializes in processing large textual datasets and using vector-based
text representation models such as Word2Vec. I exploited these pre-trained mod-
els to perform tasks such as finding similarity between words and creating vector
representations for textual data.
The Transformers library is an open-source text processing library for Python. It has
been developed by Hugging Face and is used to create and train deep learning models
for various text processing tasks such as text classification, text generation and
machine translation. It is based on the architecture of transform neural networks,
and we have used this library to transform participant responses into vectors to
measure inter-subject and intra-subject similarities using CamemBERT [26] and
FlauBERT [27] pre-trained models.
Finally, to use pre-trained models in English with non-English data, I integrated a
free version of DeepL API into our data processing pipeline. DeepL is a neural trans-

3 Analysis methodology
lation platform that offers high performance and high accuracy in text translation.
This API made it possible to automatically translate the data into English and guar-
antee their compatibility with the models, to facilitate analysis and understanding
of the results.
These different techniques and tools were essential for the realization of my intern-
ship, allowing me to perform advanced manipulations on the data, to clean and
normalize the text, to visualize the results and to exploit pre-trained models for
textual analysis.
3.1 Data preparation
During my internship, I implemented a variety of text pre-processing techniques
to prepare the textual data for subsequent analyses. These techniques included
cleaning, normalization, and text transformation steps (see Figure 8).
Figure 8: A schema illustrating the steps involved in text preprocessing.
First, I performed text cleaning operations to remove unwanted elements such as

punctuation, special characters, and missing values. This resulted in cleaner, more
consistent text, making the next steps of processing easier. I also removed stopwords
that do not provide any semantic value and could bias the analyses.
Next, I used text normalization techniques to make the text more uniform and
facilitate comparisons. I performed lowercaseization of all words to reduce case

variation. I also applied the lemmatization, which consists of reducing words to

their basic form (lemma), in order to reduce the dimensionality of the vocabulary
and to group variants of the same word.
I also proceeded to the tokenization of the text, i.e. the division of the text into
lexical units called tokens. This makes it possible to segment the text into words or
sentences, thus facilitating subsequent analysis and processing. I used tools such as
Spacy, Stanza and NLTK to perform this tokenization step efficiently and accurately.
Finally, I used vector-based text representation techniques to transform text into
digital vectors, ready for use in machine learning models. I used pre-trained models
such as GloVe for simple words and BERT models to obtain high quality vector
representations for participants’ responses. These vector representations were used
to capture semantic similarity between responses.
The application of these text pre-processing techniques was essential to obtain qual-
ity textual data ready for use in analyses and models. By cleaning, normalizing,
segmenting, and representing text appropriately, I was able to maximize the effec-
tiveness of the text analysis methods used during my internship, allowing for more
accurate interpretations and better performing models.
3.2 Mathematical approaches

In the field of cognitive science, statistics techniques are used to analyze the answers
to questionnaires or experimental tasks, in order to describe the characteristics of
the answers or to compare the results between different groups.
3.2.1 Quantitative analysis & descriptive statistics

In our study, we used quantitative analysis and descriptive statistics to analyze the
text responses given by participants. We calculated the number of responses and
words, as well as the length of words used by each participant. This allowed us to
gain a better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in generating these
responses and to draw meaningful conclusions about our research question.
By using these methods, we were able to identify patterns and trends in the data,
which helped us to better understand how participants were thinking and responding
to the questions we asked. Additionally, our use of descriptive statistics allowed us
to summarize and present our findings in a clear and concise manner, making it
easier to understand and interpret the results.
3.2.2 Cosine similarity

Cosine similarity is a measure of similarity between two non-zero vectors of an inner
product space. It is often used to measure document similarity in text analysis. The
formula to compute cosine similarity between two vectors A and B is given by:

Pn
A·B Ai Bi
SC (A, B) = cos(θ) = = pPn i=12 pPn
kAkkBk i=1 Ai
2
i=1 Bi
Where A · B is the dot product of vectors A and B, and ||A|| and ||B|| are the
magnitudes (or norms) of vectors A and B, respectively [28].
In our case, we used cosine similarity to calculate the inter-group similarity in an
evocation and description task, as well as the similarity between participants and a
reference response in a description task.
Figure 9: Cosine similarity for vector space models.
Here’s a graphic in Figure 9 showing two vectors with similarities close to 1, close
to 0, and close to -1.
3.2.3 Repeated measures ANOVA

Analysis of variance with repeated measurement is a statistical method that makes
it possible to compare the means obtained by matched samples[29, 30]. It is used
to test the effect of one or more qualitative explanatory variables on a quantitative
dependent variable that is measured several times on the same subjects. For ex-
ample, this method can be used to study the evolution of pain in patients who are
undergoing treatment. The assumptions of this method are as follows:
• The null hypothesis (H0): there are no significant differences between the
means of the dependent groups.
• The alternative hypothesis (Ha): there is a significant difference between
at least two means of the dependent groups.
To test these hypotheses, a p-value is calculated, corresponding to the probability
of obtaining the observed results if the null hypothesis is true. If the p-value is below
a predefined significance level (usually 0.05), the null hypothesis is rejected and it
is concluded that there is an effect of the explanatory variables on the dependent
variable.
In addition to these hypotheses, repeated-measures ANOVA assumes that the data
meet certain conditions:

Table 3: An example of a data snippet for the similarity measure using

SentenceBERT as an input for ANOVA
Juge Groupe T0 T1 T2
C1 CTRL 0.2291735284 0.2716048087
C10 CTRL 0.3014770065 0.2748694107
C11 CTRL 0.2744678091 0.1720879887
C12 CTRL 0.2434420459 0.1803486546
C13 CTRL 0.2162746218 0.2367323786
C14 CTRL 0.2612136049 0.2819378045
C15 CTRL 0.1678767215 0.2627067502
C16 CTRL 0.295219476 0.3641982749
C17 CTRL 0.3213923151 0.4006748945
J1 ISIPCA 0.2943289988 0.3441639841 0.1889039491
J10 ISIPCA 0.2493424309 0.4035999533 0.3439996958
J12 ISIPCA 0.323846442 0.2053571258 0.291668835
J14 ISIPCA 0.172436446 0.1559565675 0.1877741717
J2 ISIPCA 0.3896364868 0.2223658532 0.3889127714
J23 ISIPCA 0.2099970592 0.283210285 0.2950525121
J24 ISIPCA 0.2773481565 0.3201470574 0.298510928
J26 ISIPCA 0.3816302046 0.3322616657 0.260517223
J27 ISIPCA 0.4935722649 0.2991049886 0.3196476599
• Normality: the dependent variable follows a normal distribution in each

group.
• Sphericity: the variances of the differences between the levels of the explana-
tory variables are equal.
• Independence: measurement errors are independent of each other.
These conditions must be checked before performing the analysis, and may require
transformations or corrections if they are not met.
We used the two-way repeated measures ANOVA to test whether the result obtained
in the categorization task (or tri task) was significant depending on the time of
measurement and the group. The time of measurement was a within-subject factor
with three levels (T0,T1, and T2) and the group was a between-subject factor with
two levels (ISIPCA and control groups). The dependent variable was the outcome of
data analysis (see Table 3 as exemple of data given to ANOVA), which included the
mean number of words, the similarity of description provided by participants and
product composition, or the agreement measure among participants.. We checked
the conditions of normality, sphericity and independence of errors before performing
the analysis.

3.2.4 Cohen’s kappa

In the smell categorization test, each participant groups the odors according to their
own perception. To measure the agreement between participants, there are several
approaches, including Cohen’s kappa.
Cohen’s kappa (Jacob Cohen 1960) is a statistical measure of agreement between
two raters in qualitative category coding. Cohen’s kappa measures the degree of
agreement between the two judges’ assessments, relative to chance.
Po − P e
κ=
1 − Pe
where:
κ is the Cohen’s kappa coefficient, Po is the observed agreement,Pe is the expected agreement.
If the assessors totally agree, Cohen’s kappa is equal to 1. If they totally disagree
(or agree due solely to chance), Cohen’s kappa is less than or equal to 0.
3.2.5 Rand index

In the field of unsupervised machine learning, the Rand index is widely used as
a performance evaluator to measure the similarity between clusters generated by
different algorithms.
Figure 10: Clustering example with kMeans (left) and Mean shift (right). These
two clusterings have an adjusted Rand index of 94%
Using the Rand Index as the similarity calculation measure, we can compute the
clustering accuracy at each iteration of the clustering process. Take Figure 11 for
example, for the pairs which are placed in the same cluster (i.e., same color) in P 1
and P 2 contains (a1 , a2 ), (a1 , a3 ), (a2 , a3 ), (a5 , a6 ), (a8 , a9 ). The pairs that are
placed in different clusters in both P 1 and P 2 include (a1 , a5 ), (a1 , a6 ), (a1 , a7 ),

(a1 , a8 ), (a1 , a9 ), (a2 , a5 ), (a2 , a6 ), (a2 , a7 ), (a2 , a8 ), (a2 , a9 ), (a3 , a5 ), (a3 , a6 ), (a3 ,
a7 ), (a3 , a8 ), (a3 , a9 ), (a4 , a7 ), (a4 , a8 ), (a4 , a9 ), (a5 , a8 ), (a5 , a9 ), (a6 , a8 ), (a6 , a9 ).
Then, there is Rand(P 1, P 2) = 5+22 36
= 75% . Obviously, the value of Rand Index
increases with iterations and at the final iteration of the clustering process, where
Pi = Pf , there is Rand(Pi , Pf ) = 1, which indicates that the process completes with
a 100% accuracy.
Figure 11: An example of calculating Rand Index between two partitions
In our approach, we used the Rand index to quantify the overall agreement between
the categorizations of the test and the real categories of the subjects. The Rand
index measures the similarity between two sets of partitions by considering the pairs
of objects that are classified in the same way in both sets. Using this measure, we
were able to evaluate the performance of our categorization test in terms of overall
agreement with the real categories.
There are several other approaches to measure agreement between two or more meth-
ods of measurement. Some common measures of agreement include the concordance
correlation coefficient, total deviation index, and limits of agreement. These mea-
sures tend to be scalar quantities, with either small or large values implying good
agreement between the methods. Perfect agreement is implied by specific boundary
values of the measures.
3.3 Machine learning tools

3.3.1 Word embedding
In this work, we employed the word embedding technique to express the responses of
participants as vectors. This technique enables the representation of each word in a

dictionary through a set of real numbers, commonly known as word representations

[31]. The significance of this novel representation lies in the fact that words with
similar contextual usage possess corresponding vectors that are relatively proximate.
Word embedding, also known as word vectorization, is a method utilized in au-
tomated language processing to acquire a word’s representation, as illustrated in
Figure 12. This technique allows the conversion of every word in a dictionary into a
numerical vector. By employing this approach, it becomes feasible to compare the
vectors of various words, such as measuring the angle between them.
Figure 12: Linear Relationships between Words from developers.google.com
Word embedding models capture various semantic relationships between words. For
example, "king" - "queen" (male, female), "swimming" - "swam" (verb, tense), and
"Paris" - "France" (capital, country), as illustrated in Figure 12. The vectors associ-
ated with these pairs reflect meaningful patterns that highlight gender associations,
verb tense transformations, and geographic hierarchies. Word embedding provide
valuable insights for language processing and analysis tasks.
Within our study, we employed this technique to portray the participants’ responses
as vectors. Consequently, we were able to compare and analyze the similarities and
dissimilarities among the responses from different participants for the description
and evocation tasks.
Word embedding is grounded on the distributional hypothesis [32] (often referred
to as the "Harris" hypothesis) that states words with comparable contextual usage
possess interconnected meanings. This technique serves the purpose of reducing
the dimensionality of word representations in comparison to vector models, thus
facilitating learning tasks associated with these words, as they are less affected by
dimension-related challenges [33].
To employ data effectively in machine learning, it is imperative to discover a math-
ematical representation, typically in the form of vectors. Word embedding offer
a representation of words in the form of vectors. By encoding all the words in
a dictionary using this method, it becomes possible to compare the word vectors,

for instance, by measuring the angle between them using cosine similarity, or by
calculating the Euclidean distance.
Before discussing some word embedding algorithms in detail, it’s important to note
that participants provide responses in the form of both simple words and sentences.
Therefore, it’s crucial to break down the sentences so that we can use the word
embedding templates. Afterward, we’ll explore the approaches that provide vector
representations of the entire sentences
3.3.2 Word2Vec
In 2013, Tomas Mikolov and his team at Google published two significant papers
[34, 31] that introduced novel models for effectively estimating vector representations
of words using large datasets. The research focused on addressing the challenge of
capturing semantic relationships between words in a continuous vector space.
One of the groundbreaking techniques introduced in these papers was Word2Vec,
a widely recognized natural language processing algorithm. Word2Vec employs a
neural network model to learn word associations from extensive collections of text,
such as large corpora or documents. The algorithm aims to map words to continuous
vector representations, enabling mathematical operations on these vectors to reveal
meaningful relationships between words.
Once trained, a Word2Vec model can exhibit impressive capabilities. For exam-
ple, it can identify words that are semantically similar or related to a given word.
This ability makes Word2Vec valuable for a variety of NLP tasks, including infor-
mation retrieval, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and more. Additionally,
the model can suggest additional words that could fit contextually within a partial
sentence, offering potential applications in text completion and generation.
To generate distributed word representations, Word2Vec models can use two primary
architectures: Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) and Continuous Skip-gram. These
architectures are illustrated in Figure 13 from the main paper [34]. The CBOW
architecture predicts a target word based on the surrounding context words, whereas
the Skip-gram architecture predicts the context words given a target word.
1. Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) :
• Input : In the CBOW architecture, the input consists of a context window
comprising surrounding words. For instance, in a sentence such as "The
cat sat on the mat," with a context window size of two, the input for the
word "sat" would be the words "The," "cat," "on," and "the".
• Projection : The input words are encoded as one-hot vectors, representing
individual words within a predefined vocabulary. These one-hot vectors
serve as input representations for the neural network.
• Output : The primary objective of CBOW is to predict the target word
based on its contextual information. The output layer of the neural net-

Figure 13: Architectural comparison of CBOW and Skip-gram models for word
representation learning.
work employs a softmax activation function, generating a probability dis-

tribution across the vocabulary. Each output node corresponds to a word
in the vocabulary, and the network aims to produce high probabilities for
words likely to appear in the context.
• Training : During training, the network adjusts its parameters by com-
paring the predicted word probabilities with the actual target word using
a suitable loss function, such as cross-entropy. By minimizing the loss,
the model learns to accurately predict the target word given its context.
2. Continuous Skip-gram :
• Input : In contrast to CBOW, the input for the Skip-gram architecture is
a single target word. Using the aforementioned example sentence ("The
cat sat on the mat") as illustrated in Figure 14 from this paper [35], if
the target word is "sat," it is utilized as the input.
• Projection : Similar to CBOW, the input word is represented as a one-hot
vector.
• Output : The objective of the Skip-gram architecture is to predict the
context words given a target word. The output layer of the neural net-
work aims to generate probabilities for each context word in the vocab-
ulary. Thus, the output layer consists of multiple nodes, with each node
representing a context word.
• Training : Similar to CBOW, the network parameters are updated dur-

ing training by comparing the predicted context word probabilities with

the actual context words. The loss function is employed to measure the
discrepancy between the predicted and actual values, and the model is
trained to minimize this loss.
Figure 14: Skip-gram paradigm example demonstrates how to predict context

using a single word.
In both architectures, the input and output layers are connected via a hidden layer,
known as the projection layer. The projection layer has a lower dimensionality
compared to the input and output layers, and its purpose is to learn meaningful
representations of words in a continuous vector space.
3.3.3 GloVe
GloVe, short for Global Vectors for Word Representation, is an unsupervised learning
algorithm developed by Stanford University in this paper [36]. It generates word
embeddings by utilizing a global word-context co-occurrence matrix derived from a
corpus. These embeddings exhibit intriguing linear substructures within the vector
space.
Figure 15: Co-occurrence matrix for three sentences with two words as context.

The GloVe model’s fundamental methodology begins by constructing a substantial

word-context co-occurrence matrix containing pairs of words and their associated
contexts (which can be word sequences). The aim is to apply matrix factorization
to approximate this matrix. For example, suppose we have three sentences: “I enjoy
flying.”, “I like NLP.” and “I like deep learning.” Considering one word to the left
and one word to the right as context, we simply count the number of occurrences of
other words within this context. Using the above sentences, we have eight distinct
vocab elements (including full stop), and this is how the word-context co-occurrence
matrix X looks like, as depicted in Figure 15.
After calculating word-context co-occurrence matrix (WC), we want to find a way
to decompose it into two matrices: word-feature matrix (WF) and feature-context
matrix (FC), such that WC = WF · FC as proofed in Figure 16. This means
that we can use WF and FC to approximate WC by multiplying them together.
To do this, we randomly assign some weights to WF and FC and then try to get a
matrix WC’ that is close to WC by multiplying them. We repeat this process using
Stochastic Gradient Descent 3 to reduce the error. At the end, the WF matrix gives
us the word embeddings for each word with a fixed number of dimensions F.
Figure 16: Conceptual model for the GloVe model’s implementation from
towardsdatascience.com.
It is important to note that Word2Vec and GloVe models work in a similar way.
They both try to create a vector space where the position of each word depends on
its neighboring words based on their meaning and context. The difference is that
Word2Vec uses local examples of word pairs that co-occur, while GloVe uses global
statistics of word co-occurrence across the whole corpus.
3.3.4 Transformers
In the field of natural language processing, word embedding techniques have revo-
lutionized the way we represent and understand the meaning of words. However,
traditional embedding models such as Word2Vec and GloVe are limited in their abil-
3
SGD is a technique used to optimize the parameters of a machine learning algorithm. By
making small, iterative changes to the configuration of the machine learning network, using a
randomly selected subset of data in order to reduce the error of the network.

ity to capture complex relationships between words and to grasp long-range context.
This is where transformers come in.
Artificial intelligence in general has undergone significant evolution thanks to the
introduction of transformers. This architecture, as shown in Figure 17 was intro-
duced in a paper titled Attention Is All You Need [37] by Ashish Vaswani and
his team. By outperforming recurrent neural network 4 based models, transform-
ers have revolutionized the way we approach text processing tasks such as machine
translation, text generation and many others.
Figure 17: Diagram of a transformer architecture, showing the encoder and decoder
components with self-attention layers and multi-head attention mechanisms.
Transformers were designed to overcome the limitations of previous models, partic-

ularly with regard to capturing long-term dependencies and grasping the complex
context of words in a sequence. Unlike RNNs that process data sequentially, trans-
formers use an attention-based approach that allows them to simultaneously consider
4
RNN is a type of artificial neural network that has connections between nodes that form a
directed graph along a temporal sequence, allowing it to exhibit temporal dynamic behavior for a
time sequence.

the entire sequence. This ability to model interactions between words without re-
lying on a recurrent structure has marked a turning point in the field of natural
language processing.
Figure 18: Scaled dot-product attention mechanism. Queries, keys, and values are
input into the attention mechanism.
Attention is at the heart of transformers. It allows models to focus on specific

parts of the sequence by assigning importance weights to each word based on its
context. Thus, transformers are able to capture complex semantic relationships and
long-range dependencies more effectively, we can distinguish two types of attention:
1. Scaled Dot-Product Attention : is a key mechanism used in Transformers
to calculate the attention weights between the different parts of a sequence.
It works by taking three inputs: a query Q, a key K and a value V . Using
the dot product between the query and the key, we obtain attention scores (as
shown in Figure 18). These scores are then normalized and used to weight the
corresponding values. The operation is called "scaling" because the scores are
divided by the square root of the query dimension to control the amplitude of
the attention values. Given Q, K, and V , the scaled dot-product attention is
calculated as follows:
QK T

Attention(Q, K, V ) = softmax √ V
dk
2. Multi-Head Attention : is an extension of the scaled dot-product attention.

Instead of using a single key-value query pair, multi-head attention uses sev-
eral heads that perform independent attention calculations (as illustrated in
Figure 19). Each head generates its own attention weights and weighted val-
ues. Then the results of each head are concatenated and linearly transformed
to obtain the final output. The use of multiple heads allows Transformers to

learn different representations of attention and capture complex relationships

between words in a sequence. Given Q, K, and V , the multi-head attention is
calculated as follows:
Multi-Head(Q, K, V ) = Concati∈[#heads] (Attention(XWiQ , XWiK , XWiV ))W O
Figure 19: Multi-head attention mechanism. Queries, keys, and values are linearly
projected multiple times.
As mentioned in the architecture above (Figure 17), transformers consists of an

encoder and a decoder. The encoder (in the left side) takes as input a sequence of
words and transforms them into a vector representation, while the decoder (in the
right side) uses this representation to generate the desired output sequence. Self-
attention layers play a central role in both components, allowing the model to focus
on the most relevant parts of the sequence when generating the vector representation
and output sequence.
Upstream of their use for specific tasks, transformers are often pre-trained on large
sets of unlabelled text data. This pre-training allows them to acquire general lan-
guage knowledge and develop a basic representation of words and their context.
Subsequently, models are fine-tuned by training them on specific tasks with labelled
data in order to precisely adapt them to the task at hand.
In our study, we used FlauBERT [27], CamemBERT [26] and Sentence-BERT [38]
as pre-trained transformer models to measure the similarity of the chords of the par-
ticipants’ responses. FlauBERT and CamemBERT are pre-trained language models
for French. Sentence-BERT is a pre-trained model for the semantic comparison of

sentences in English. Although these models are all pre-trained transformers, they
have been trained on different data sets and for different tasks.
3.3.5 Principal component analysis

We have previously seen how to represent text in vector form using different tech-
niques. The larger the dimension of the vector, the more accurately it represents
the text. This is useful for calculating the similarity between texts. However, to
graphically visualize these words in the form of a point cloud, it is impossible to do
so on more than 3 axes. So we chose to reduce the dimension to a lower level. In
the following parts we will explain in detail the techniques used.
Dimensionality reduction is a process studied in mathematics and computer sci-
ence, aimed at replacing data in a large-dimensional space with data in a smaller-
dimensional space, thus allowing faster processing. Different approaches are used,
such as feature selection, where a set of relevant variables is kept, and feature ex-
traction, which creates new, more relevant variables.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a method of data analysis and, more gen-
erally, of multivariate statistics [39]. It involves transforming related variables into
new variables that are decorrelated5 from one another. These new variables are
called principal components or principal axes. Here are the steps to perform PCA,
including details for each step:
1. Standardize the Data: it is important to standardize the data to have
zero mean and unit variance. This step ensures that all variables are on the
same scale and prevents variables with larger variances from dominating the
analysis. Standardization is typically done by subtracting the mean of each
variable from its values and then dividing by the standard deviation. The
standardization equation is written as:
x − x̄
xstd =
σx
where xstd is the standardized value of x, x̄ is the mean of x, and σx is the
standard deviation of x.
2. Compute the Covariance Matrix: which represents the relationships be-
tween different variables in the data set. It is a square matrix where each
element represents the covariance between two variables. The covariance be-
tween two variables x and y is calculated as:
n
1X
cov(x, y) = (xi − x̄)(yi − ȳ)
n i=1
5
Correlation is a statistical measure that indicates the strength and direction of the linear
relationship between two quantitative variables.

where n is the number of data points, xi and yi are the values of variables x
and y, and x̄ and ȳ are their respective means. Repeat this computation for
each pair of variables to fill the covariance matrix.
3. Calculate Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues: the covariance matrix is sym-
metric, so it can be diagonalized using eigendecomposition. The eigenvec-
tors represent the directions or axes in the original feature space, while the
eigenvalues indicate their importance or variance explained. To calculate the
eigenvectors and eigenvalues, solve the equation:
CovarianceMatrix · Eigenvector = Eigenvalue · Eigenvector
This can be done using numerical methods or linear algebra libraries.

4. Create a Feature Vector: also known as the principal component matrix,
is constructed by stacking the eigenvectors corresponding to the highest eigen-
values. The eigenvectors are arranged in descending order based on their
corresponding eigenvalues. These principal components capture the most im-
portant information in the data and are used to project the data onto a lower-
dimensional space.
5. Recast Data Along Principal Component Axes: to obtain the new data
representation along the principal component axes, multiply the standardized
data matrix by the feature vector matrix. This projection yields a new data
set where the variables are uncorrelated and sorted based on their importance.
The resulting data set can be used for further analysis or visualization.
3.3.6 t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding

In recent years, the t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding) algorithm
has emerged as a powerful tool for analyzing and visualizing high-dimensional data[40].
This non-linear dimensionality reduction technique has been shown to be particu-
larly effective in visualizing complex datasets. Unlike linear techniques such as PCA,
which aim to preserve the variance in the data by projecting it onto lower dimen-
sions, t-SNE focuses on preserving the pairwise similarities between data points
in a lower-dimensional space. This makes it well-suited for visualizing data with
complex, nonlinear relationships. Here are the four steps of the t-SNE algorithm:
• Step 1: Compute Similarities
The first step is to compute pairwise similarities between data points in the
high-dimensional space. The similarities are typically computed using the
Gaussian kernel, which measures the similarity between two points based on
their Euclidean distance. The equation for computing the similarity between
two points, xi and xj , using the Gaussian kernel is given by:
exp(−kxi − xj k2 /(2σi2 ))
pij = P 2 2
k6=l exp(−kxk − xl k /(2σi ))

where pij represents the similarity between points xi and xj , σi is the variance
of the Gaussian distribution for point xi , and the sum in the denominator
ensures that the similarities form a probability distribution.
• Step 2: Compute Affinities
In this step, the algorithm converts the similarities into conditional probabil-
ities, also known as affinities. This is achieved by symmetrizing the pairwise
similarities and normalizing them. The equation for computing the affinity qij
between two points, xi and xj , in the low-dimensional space is given by:
(1 + kyi − yj k2 )−1
qij = P 2 −1
k6=l (1 + kyk − yl k )
where yi and yj represent the corresponding points in the low-dimensional

space.
• Step 3: Compute Gradient
Next, the algorithm computes the gradient that represents the difference be-
tween the similarities in the high-dimensional space and the affinities in the
low-dimensional space. It aims to minimize this difference using gradient de-
scent. The equation for computing the gradient ∂y ∂C
i
of the cost function with
respect to the low-dimensional representation yi is given by:
∂C X
=4 (pij − qij )(yi − yj )(1 + kyi − yj k2 )−1
∂yi j
where C represents the cost function.

• Step 4: Update Embedding
Finally, the algorithm updates the low-dimensional embedding by taking a
small step in the direction of the negative gradient. This step involves adjusting
the positions of the data points in the low-dimensional space iteratively. The
equation for updating the embedding yi in each iteration is given by:
(t+1) (t) ∂C
yi = yi + η
∂yi
(t+1)
where yi represents the new position of the point yi in the (t+1)-th itera-
(t)
tion, yi represents the current position of yi , η is the learning rate, and ∂y
∂C
i
is the computed gradient.
Figure 20 illustrates the results of applying both PCA and t-SNE dimensionality
reduction techniques to 5000 samples from the MNIST handwritten digit dataset
[41]. The plots show the projected data points in 2D space, with different colors
representing different digits. While neither method achieves perfect clustering of
the data points by digit, it is clear that t-SNE produces a significantly better result,
with more distinct and well-separated clusters. This demonstrates the effectiveness
of t-SNE in visualizing complex high-dimensional data.

Figure 20: Comparison of PCA (on the left) and t-SNE (on the right) on 5000
samples from the MNIST handwritten digit dataset (from ml-lectures.org).
In conclusion, dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA and t-SNE have

proven to be powerful tools for visualizing high-dimensional data. In our study, we
used these techniques to project participants’ response distributions onto 2D and
3D plots. This allowed us to effectively visualize the complex relationships between
the data points and gain valuable insights into the underlying patterns in the data.

4 Results
4 Results
The main objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of olfactory learning on
the sensory perception of perfumery students. We sought to understand how this
learning could influence their ability to evoke associations and spontaneous thoughts
related to odors, to provide accurate descriptions of perceived odors, and to carry
out an appropriate categorization of olfactory products.
4.1 Description task

The purpose of this task was to obtain detailed descriptions of the odors perceived
by perfumery students. We wanted to evaluate the impact of their training on the
quality and accuracy of the descriptions provided. Our hypothesis was that students
would be able to describe olfactory products more accurately after their training,
using precise and descriptive language. We sought to observe whether training would
encourage them to generate a greater number of descriptive terms and provide more
accurate verbatim in their descriptions.
4.1.1 Richness of vocabulary

In the description task, we studied the richness of vocabulary among perfume stu-
dents. To do this, we counted the number of responses and the number of words
used by each participant on each measure. Next, we examined whether students
used a lexicon or vocabulary specifically related to scents. We analyzed the terms
and expressions used to describe the characteristics and qualities of perceived odors,
to determine whether olfactory learning had an influence on participants’ vocabulary
enrichment in this domain.
Number of answers
Figure 21 shows the average number of answers per group and per measurement time.
At time T0, the perfumery students as well as the control group gave an average of 5
answers. However, a significant evolution has been observed in perfumery students
over time. At time T1, their average number of responses increased to 7, then
reached an average of 10 responses at time T2. On the other hand, the control
group showed a slower increase in the number of responses given over time, going
from an average of 5 responses at time T0 to an average of 6 responses at time T2.
A one-way ANOVA was performed to assess differences in learning times. The
ANOVA results revealed a significant effect of learning time on number of answers,
F (2, 240) = 36.5, p < 0.05. Using the post-hoc tests6 , ISIPCA students displayed
significantly higher performances at time T1 (M = 7.05, SD = 3.92) compared to
time T0 (M = 4.85, SD = 3.03),t(df ) = −3.48, p < 0.05. Similarly, the performance
at time T2(M = 9.75, SD = 3.10)was significantly better than that at time T0,
6
Post-hoc test is a statistical test that is used after an analysis of variance (ANOVA) to deter-
mine which groups are significantly different from each other.

4 Results
Figure 21: Average number of answers given per group and per measurement time
for the description task.
t(df ) = −8.95, p < 0.05. In addition, a significant difference was observed between
the times T1 and T2, t(df ) = −5.00, p < 0.05.
Vocabulary
Figure 22: Frequency of the words most used by the ISIPCA group for the
description task.
The figure 22 shows the frequency of the words most used by the ISIPCA group
(perfumery students) during the description task. The words are classified according
to their frequency of use, with the most frequent words displayed first.
The analysis of the data revealed that the ISIPCA group uses words specific to the

4 Results
field of perfumery more frequently. Among the words most used by this group, we
find terms such as "boisé", "zesté" and "fruité".
The figure 23 shows the frequency of the words most used by the control group.
Compared to the ISIPCA group, the control group uses a vocabulary less specific
to the field of perfumery, with a more balanced distribution between the different
categories of words.
Figure 23: Frequency of the words most used by the control group for the
description task.
The results in the figure 24 shows that the number of words used from the selected
vocabulary increased significantly over time. At T0, participants used an average of
4 words from the selected vocabulary, while at T1 this number increased to 5 words,
and at T2 it reached 7 words on average. The ANOVA tests carried out reveal
a strong statistical significance with a p-value of less than 0.001 and F (2, 148) =
28.4, indicating that the differences observed in the number of words used in the
vocabulary between the different measurement times are highly significant.
Post-hoc tests revealed significant differences between the learning times for the
number of words used from the selected vocabulary in the ISIPCA group. A sig-
nificant improvement was observed between T0 (M = 3.55, SD = 2.27) and T1
(M = 5.05, SD = 3.06) , t(df ) = −2.79, p < 0.05), a significant increase was ob-
served between T0 and T2 (M = 7.37, SD = 2.64) , t(df ) = −8.22, p < 0.05). A sig-
nificant difference was also observed between T1 and T2, t(df ) = −4.40, p < 0.05).
These results underline the positive effect of learning on the increased use of the
selected vocabulary over time.
4.1.2 Grammatical tagging

In this study, we carried out a part-of-speech tagging of the answers provided by the
participants. The objective was to examine the grammatical types most frequently

4 Results
Figure 24: Number of words used from the vocabulary selected (40% of the most
frequent words) by the ISIPCA group.
used in their answers. We used the Spacy library for the initial morphosyntactic
labeling, followed by a manual correction of the labels to guarantee the accuracy of
the results. The data obtained allow us to present the results of this analysis and
to highlight the grammatical types most used by the participants.
Figure 25 illustrates the evolution of the use of nouns and adjectives (the other
grammatical types have been neglected because they are rarely used) over time.
The results indicate a significant increase in the use of adjectives, while the use of
nouns showed a gradual decrease.
Figure 25: Evolution of the use of adjectives (on the left) and nouns (on the right)
over time at ISIPCA students.
The results of the ANOVA revealed a significant effect of time on the use of adjectives
F (2, 0.15) = 3.22, p < 0.05. Using post-hoc tests, we examined the specific differ-
ences between the different pairs of measurement periods. The results of the post-hoc

4 Results
tests showed significant differences between the periods T0(M = 0.46, SD = 0.52)
and T2(M = 0.63, SD = 0.50), t(df ) = −2.39, p < 0.05), as well as between the
periods T1(M = 0.53, SD = 0.51) and T2, t(df ) = −2.24, p < 0.05), confirming
a significant increase in the use of adjectives over time. However, no significant
differences were observed between the T0 and T1 periods, t(df ) = −0.50, p > 0.05).
A statistical test revealed a significant effect of time on the use of nouns, F (2, 0.09) =
5.56, p < 0.05. However, the post-hoc tests did not reveal significant differences be-
tween the different measurement periods, with the exception of T0(M = 0.75, SD =
0.63) to T2(M = 0.50, SD = 0.59) which showed a significant difference with a p-
value < 0.05.
4.1.3 Intra-subject similarity

Before starting with the similarity analysis, I’ll show how the responses are rep-
resented graphically. To do this, we transformed the responses provided by the
participants, using model transformers to encode them into vector representations.
Then, to simplify the analysis, we reduced these vectors to a two-dimensional space
using dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA and t-SNE. This enabled us
to visualize participants’ responses in a 2D space and explore patterns and emerging
trends.
Figure 26 shows the visualization of participants’ responses in a two-dimensional
space using principal component analysis (PCA). In this representation, the re-
sponses of participants in the ISIPCA and control groups show a similar distribu-
tion, with no distinct groupings. The points corresponding to the responses of both
groups are comparably dispersed, indicating an overall similarity in the distribution
of responses between the two groups.
Figure 26: Visualization of participant responses in 2D space using PCA for the
description task.

4 Results
However, in Figure 27 , which represents the visualization of the same participant

responses using the t-SNE dimensionality reduction technique, clusters of responces
are observed specifically in the ISIPCA group. Responses from participants in the
ISIPCA group tend to cluster together, forming clusters or areas of higher density,
suggesting increased similarity between their responses in this reduced space. In
contrast, the responses of the control group do not show such distinct groupings.
Figure 27: Visualization of participant responses in 2D space using TSNE for the
description task.
This difference in clustering between the two visualization techniques highlights the
ability of the t-SNE technique to reveal more subtle structures and similarities in
participants’ responses, particularly in the ISIPCA group. These observations will
be taken into account in subsequent analysis to better understand the differences
and characteristics of the perfumery students’ responses compared to the control
group.
Cosine similarity
The graph 28 shows the evolution of within-subject cosine similarity over time (T0,
T1 and T2). Cosine similarity measures the semantic proximity between the re-
sponses of each participant. For the ISIPCA group, a decrease in cosine similarity
indicates an increasing divergence of responses over time, perhaps highlighting the
richness and diversity of responses provided by perfumery students. Despite this
decrease, statistical analyses revealed no significant differences, either in terms of
temporal variation or between groups. This indicates that the diversity of responses
cannot be attributed to significant changes over time or to variations specific to the
ISIPCA group.

4 Results
Figure 28: Graph illustrating the evolution of intra-subject cosine similarity over
time using FlauBERT for the description task.
Euclidean distance
The graph shows the evolution of within-subject Euclidean distance over time (T0,
T1 and T2) for the ISIPCA group. Euclidean distance measures the semantic dis-
similarity between each participant’s responses. We observe an increase in Euclidean
distance, reflecting a greater divergence of responses over time. This increase high-
lights the richness and diversity of the responses provided by perfumery students.
Significantly, this increase in Euclidean distance was observed both in comparison
between groups and as a function of time. Post-hoc tests confirmed these results,
revealing a significant difference between T0 and T2, p < 0.05, t(df ) = −4.69, as
well as between T1 and T2, p < 0.05, t(df ) = −2.88. In contrast, no significant
difference was observed between T0 and T1, p > 0.05, t(df ) = −1.72.
Figure 29: Graph showing the evolution of intra-subject Euclidean distance over
time using FlauBERT for the description task.

4 Results
4.2 Evocation task

The aim of this task was to assess the ability of perfumery students to spontaneously
evoke and share their associations and thoughts when perceiving odors. We aimed to
compare their performance with that of a control population and to verify whether
students were less inclined towards evocation and more oriented towards description.
Our hypothesis was that, compared to the control population, students would be
less inclined towards evocation and would be more likely to use descriptive language.
4.2.1 Diversity of words

The study focused on the diversity of words used by participants for sensory evo-
cation. In addition to the average number of words used, a terminological analysis
was carried out to assess the richness and variety of fragrance-specific vocabulary
used by each group.
Number of words
The bar plot 30 shows the results of the evolution of the average number of words
used over time for both groups, ISIPCA (perfumery students) and the control group.
There is a clear increase in the number of words used by perfumery students, while
the control group shows a decrease. These differences are statistically significant,
with a value of p<0.005 and a high F, indicating a real difference and not due to
chance.
Figure 30: Evolution of the average number of words used over time for the
ISIPCA group and the control group for the evocation task.
The results of the post-hoc tests also provided additional information on the signifi-
cant differences between the different times. In the ISIPCA group, these tests showed
statistical significance between T0(M = 7.5, SD = 3.53) and T2(M = 11.1, SD =

4 Results
3.88), as well as between T1(M = 8.72, SD = 5.46) and T2. This suggests a gradual
improvement in word use over time among perfumery students.
In contrast, the control group showed a decrease in the average number of words used
over time. Although this decrease was less pronounced than the increase observed
among perfumery students, it was nonetheless statistically significant.
Terminology analysis
Figure 31 shows the results of the ISIPCA group’s lexical diversity analysis of the
sensory evocation task. Perfumery students used a wide range of perfume-specific
terms, highlighting their expertise in sensory language. The most frequently used
words such as "fleur", "citron" and "parfum" reflect the precision with which they
expressed their olfactory sensations. These results are consistent with previous ob-
servations in the description task, where the ISIPCA group also showed a dominant
use of perfume-specific terms.
Figure 31: Frequency of the words most used by the ISIPCA group for the
evocation task.
Figure 32 shows the results of the control group’s lexical diversity analysis during
the sensory evocation task. In contrast to the ISIPCA group, the control group used
fewer perfume-specific terms. Instead, they preferred verbs such as "faire", "penser"
and "ménager". This use of more general verbs indicates a difference in approach
to sensory evocation, where the control group may have favored more abstract or
conceptual aspects when describing fragrances.
Figure 33 shows the evolution of the number of words used by the ISIPCA group
during the sensory evocation task. The results show a significant increase in the
number of words used over time. At the start of the study (T0), participants used
an average of 4 words and at T2 it reached 5 words. Post-hoc tests revealed statis-
tical significance between T0 and T2, as well as between T1 and T2, underlining a
continued improvement in perfumery students’ sensory vocabulary.

4 Results
Figure 32: Frequency of the words most used by the control group for the
evocation task.
4.2.2 Grammatical tagging

As we have shown in the description task, we have also carried out a grammatical
analysis of the answers provided by the ISIPCA group for the sensory evocation task.
We counted the number of each grammatical type used for each time measure (T0,
T1 and T2) in order to better understand the evolution of the use of the different
grammatical structures.
Figure 34 shows the use of these different grammatical categories, the results indicate
that the use of adjectives and nouns has remained relatively constant over time,
without significant variation. These two grammatical categories played an important
role in the description of perfumes, testifying to the importance given to the sensory
characteristics and attributes of perfumes by the participants.
Regarding verbs, we have observed a slight increase in their use over time. However,
this increase did not reach statistical significance, with a result of p>0.05. This
suggests that although the participants used more verbs in their descriptions as time
progressed, this increase was not significant enough to be considered statistically
different.
4.2.3 Intra-subject semantic distance

By examining the point cloud generated by the PCA in Figure 35, we observe
that the points for the two groups are uniformly dispersed in space, without the
formation of distinct clusters or groupings. This dispersion indicates that there is
no clear pattern of similarity or grouping of the responses between the participants
during this evocation task. This suggests a great variability and individuality in the
associations and memories evoked.
Similarly, the application of the t-SNE to the point cloud of the answers of the

4 Results
Figure 33: Evolution of the number of words used by the ISIPCA group during the
sensory evocation task using a vocabulary based on the most frequently used
words.
Figure 34: Evolution of the use of grammatical categories by the ISIPCA group
during the sensory evocation task at the different tenses (T0, T1 and T2).
evocation task in Figure 36 does not reveal any formation of significant clusters or
groupings. The points of the two groups are dispersed uniformly in the reduced
space, emphasizing the absence of a tendency to similarity or to the gathering of
the answers between the participants.
On the other hand, when we analyzed the data from the previous description task,
we observed clusters or groupings of significant points in Figure 27, indicating a
certain similarity and consistency in the descriptions. This highlights the difference
between the evocation task and the description task, where the first shows a uniform
dispersion of points without clusters, while the second shows more marked groupings.
Intra-subject distance
Intra-subject distance measures the diversity of responses used by each participant
during the sensory evocation task. In Figure 37, we present the evolution of within-

4 Results
Figure 35: Scatterplot of responses used by the ISIPCA group and the control
group during the sensory evocation task using PCA.
subject distance for the perfumery school group and the control group over time.
We observe an increase in within-subject semantic distance in the perfume school
students over time, indicating greater variety in the responses they provided. This
increase in within-subject distance suggests that perfumery students used a wider
range of words and sensory associations as they progressed through their training.
However, when comparing the perfumery school group with the control group, we
found no significant difference in within-subjects semantic distance, with a p-value
greater than 0.05. This indicates that the diversity of responses used between the
two groups is not statistically significant. However, it is worth noting that the
diversity of responses increases significantly in the perfumery school group between
time measurements T0 and T2, with a p-value below 0.05.
4.3 Categorization task

The main objective of this test was to evaluate the ability of perfumery students to
categorize olfactory products based on characteristics. We wanted to verify whether
students were able to form coherent groups using categories. Our hypothesis was
that, through learning, students would be able to better group and describe their
categories more accurately. We sought to observe whether their training improved
their ability to perform appropriate categorization of olfactory products.
4.3.1 Number of groups

Figure 38 shows the average number of groups formed by participants in the two
groups, ISIPCA and Control, over time. Measurements were taken at three different
times: T0, T1 and T2. The aim was to determine whether the number of groups

4 Results
Figure 36: Scatterplot of responses used by the ISIPCA and control group for the
sensory evocation task, generated using t-SNE.
formed by participants varied as a function of time, and whether there were any
differences between the two groups.
The results indicate that, for both groups, the average number of groups formed re-
mained relatively constant throughout the study. At T0, participants in both groups
formed a similar number of groups on average. This trend was also maintained at
subsequent measurements, both at T1 and T2. There were no significant variations
in the number of groups formed between the different measurement periods for either
group.
4.3.2 Agreement measure

Figure 39 shows the results of the Rand coefficient between the reference odor par-
tition, established by an expert, and the partitions proposed by participants in the
ISIPCA and Control groups over time (T0, T1 and T2). The Rand index measures
the degree of agreement between these scores, ranging from 0 (no agreement) to 1
(perfect agreement).
The results show that, initially at T0, both groups show a relatively high level of
agreement with the reference score. For the ISIPCA group, the Rand coefficient is
0.74, while for the Control group, it is slightly higher. However, at T1, we observe
an increase in the Rand index for participants in the ISIPCA group, reaching 0.77.
This reflects a better agreement between their proposed score and that of the expert.
For the Control group, although the increase is smaller, the Rand coefficient also
increases at T2.
Furthermore, the results of the analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that the
differences observed between the time measurements (T0, T1 and T2) and between

4 Results
Figure 37: Graph showing the evolution of intra-subject Euclidean distance over
time using FlauBERT for the evocation task.
Figure 38: Average number of groups formed by participants over time for the
ISIPCA and Control groups.
the ISIPCA and Control groups were not statistically significant, with a p-value
greater than 0.05. This means that there are no significant differences in Rand’s
coefficients between the different times and the two groups.
Figure 40 shows the adjusted Rand coefficient between the reference odor partition
given by an expert and the partitions given by participants for both groups (ISIPCA
and control) over time. The values of the adjusted Rand coefficient showed a decrease
compared to the previous Rand coefficient, but continued to increase slightly for
ISIPCA participants.
At time T0, the adjusted Rand coefficient was 0.08 for ISIPCA participants and 0.1
for the control group. At time T1, the adjusted Rand coefficient increased to 0.1 for
ISIPCA participants and decreased slightly to 0.09 for the control group. Finally,
at time T2, the adjusted Rand coefficient reached 0.12 for ISIPCA participants and

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Figure 39: Rand coefficient between the reference score and the participants’
scores.
Figure 40: Adjusted Rand coefficient between the reference partition and the
participants’ partitions.
showed a slight decrease to 0.08 for the control group.

The ANOVA performed revealed statistically significant results, with a p-value of
less than 0.05. This indicates that there are significant differences in the adjusted
Rand coefficients between the different measurement times for the two groups. In
addition, post-hoc tests revealed significance between time T0 and time T1, with a
p-value less than 0.05.
Figure 41 shows the Cohen’s Kappa coefficient between the reference odor partition
established by an expert and the partitions obtained by participants in the two
groups (ISIPCA and control) over time. Cohen’s Kappa coefficient measures the
agreement between partitions, taking into account both observed agreement and
agreement due to chance. Higher Cohen’s Kappa values indicate better agreement
between scores.

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Figure 41: Cohen’s Kappa between the reference score and the participants’ scores.
We observe a slight decrease in Cohen’s Kappa coefficient for the ISIPCA group over
time, suggesting a decrease in agreement in odor categorization between participants
and the reference partition. However, this decrease is not statistically significant,
meaning that it can be attributed to chance.

5 Discussion
5 Discussion
In this chapter, we will discuss the results obtained during the study on the tasks
of olfactory evocation, description and categorization among ISIPCA students and
the control group. We will analyze the main observations, the implications and the
limits of our study.
5.1 Description task

The aim of our study was to explore how olfactory learning affects sensory perception
and communication in the perfumery field. To this end, we collected responses
from participants in a perfumery school specially trained in odor detection and
description. We used a description task to assess their ability to verbally express the
olfactory characteristics of perfume samples. Here are the main results we observed:
1. Vocabulary enrichment through training
We found a significant increase in the number of descriptive terms used by
perfume students in their responses, in contrast to the control group. This
suggests that their training has a positive effect on enriching their perfumery-
specific vocabulary. This result underlines the importance of a rich and precise
vocabulary for effective communication in the perfume industry.
2. Use of perfumery-specific terms
Perfumery students used specific terms such as "floral", "boisé" and "citron"
to describe scents. This indicates that their training enables them to adopt
a more technical and specialized language in the field. This finding is key to
understanding how olfactory learning influences the way individuals perceive
and describe odors using a vocabulary shared by industry professionals.
3. Evolution of grammatical types in descriptions
Over time, we observed an increase in the use of adjectives and a decrease in
the use of nouns among perfumery students. This suggests that they are able
to provide more detailed and specific descriptions by using more adjectives
to express olfactory characteristics. We can speculate on the reasons for this
development and discuss the importance of the precise use of adjectives in
communicating olfactory sensations.
4. Similarity and diversity of response
Visual analysis of participants’ responses revealed that the ISIPCA group (the
perfumery school) showed more pronounced clustering of responses in the t-
SNE analysis, suggesting greater similarity between their responses. This may
be linked to the specific perfumery training they have received, which sensi-
tizes them to common olfactory characteristics and shared terminologies. We
can discuss the significance of this observation and its potential link with the
expertise acquired by perfumery students.

5 Discussion
5.2 Evocation Task

The results of the evocation task made it possible to highlight several interesting
observations and their implications in the context of the effect of olfactory learning
on sensory perception in perfumery students.
1. Increased word diversity and rich vocabulary
Perfumery students showed a significant increase in the average number of
words used to describe and evoke sensory experiences over time. On the other
hand, the control group showed a decrease in the number of words used. This
difference suggests that the intensive olfactory learning followed by the per-
fumery students may have contributed to the development and enrichment of
their sensory vocabulary.
2. Use of perfumery-specific terms
The terminological analysis confirmed this observation by showing that the
perfumery students mainly used terms specific to perfume, thus demonstrating
their expertise in sensory language. These results are consistent with previous
research that has highlighted the role of expertise in the formation of sensory
language and perception.
3. Evolution of grammatical labelling
Regarding grammatical labeling, the analysis of the responses revealed that
the use of adjectives and nouns has remained relatively constant over time,
testifying to the importance given by perfumery students to the sensory char-
acteristics and attributes of perfumes. On the other hand, the use of verbs
showed a slight increase, although not statistically significant. This suggests
that the participants may have given greater importance to the description of
the sensory characteristics themselves rather than to more abstract or concep-
tual aspects.
4. Intra-subject semantic distance
Regarding the intra-subject semantic distance, the absence of distinct group-
ings in the point clouds generated by PCA and t-SNE algorithm indicates a
great variability and individuality in the associations and memories evoked
by the participants during the evocation task. This suggests that the an-
swers provided by the perfumery students and by the control group were not
influenced by predetermined categories or pre-established patterns. On the
contrary, they were guided by individual sensory experiences and associations,
which suggests that olfactory learning may have refined their ability to create
unique and diverse sensory associations.
5.3 Categorization Task

The results of the categorization task provide interesting insights into participants’
ability to form coherent groups and categorize olfactory products. Overall, we found
that the perfume school participants, after intensive training, were able to form a

5 Discussion
similar number of groups compared to the control group, indicating some stability
in their categorization ability.
Analysis of agreement between participants and the reference score established by
an expert showed an initial high concordance, which improved for perfumery school
participants over time. However, an adjusted analysis accounting for agreement due
to chance revealed a slight decrease in agreement, suggesting a random contribution
in odor categorization. Despite this, agreement between participants and the expert
remained relatively stable, with a non-significant decrease over time.
Summary of results
• Description Task: The perfumery students, or the ISIPCA group, exhibited
a significant improvement in the description of scents over time. They became
more efficient in using fragrance-specific terms compared to the control group.
There was also an increase in the lexical diversity and the number of words
used by the ISIPCA group.
• Evocation Task: The ISIPCA group used a more diverse range of words
during sensory evocation, again reflecting their growing expertise. However, no
distinct pattern or clustering of responses between participants was observed,
indicating a high degree of individuality in associations and memories evoked.
• Categorization Task: While both groups remained consistent in the number
of groups formed throughout the experiment, the ISIPCA group demonstrated
an increasing alignment with expert categorizations over time, as evidenced
by increases in the Rand and adjusted Rand coefficients.
Implications
These results suggest that perfume training at ISIPCA has a significant impact on
students’ abilities to describe, evoke, and categorize scents, indicating the effective-
ness of their educational approach. The results also underscore the complexity and
individuality inherent in scent perception, and the necessity of specific training to
more precisely articulate these experiences.

5 Discussion
Conclusion
In conclusion, our study in the field of cognitive science, using textual analysis, led
to significant results despite the limited quantity of data. We were able to effectively
apply data science techniques, such as text analysis and natural language processing,
to extract relevant information from subjective and qualitative responses.
This internship was a valuable opportunity to apply our knowledge in data science
to a concrete scientific context, cognitive science. We have gained a thorough un-
derstanding of the specific challenges related to cognitive data analysis and have
developed effective strategies to overcome them.
Despite the encouraging results, we recognize that the shortage of data constitutes
an important limitation of this study. To improve the representativeness of our
results, it would be wise to expand the sample size of the control group and to test
participants from different demographics on a longer time-scale to include larger
degrees of perfume expertise. This could provide more insights into how perfume
perception varies across populations.
This internship was also an exceptional opportunity to learn how to apply skills in
data science in a cognitive science context. I was able to put our knowledge into
practice while developing valuable new skills and perspectives.
In conclusion, I am grateful to have participated in this enriching learning experi-
ence. I am convinced that the combination of data science and cognitive science
opens up vast possibilities to deepen our understanding of the human mind and its
complex processes.
I look forward to continuing our research journey using the skills and knowledge
acquired during this internship. I am aware of the challenges ahead, but I am still
motivated by the promising results obtained so far and I am determined to contribute
to the advancement of cognitive science through the application of cutting-edge
techniques in data science.

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The Effect of Olfactory Training On Sensory Perception

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The Effect of Olfactory Training On Sensory Perception

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The Effect of Olfactory Training on

Defended on July 07, 2023, in Lyon

In addition, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Pr. Khalid El Fazazy

2 Experiments & materials 14

Figure 1: Institut Lyfe (Lyon for Excellence) Logo.

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 7

1.2 L’Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cos-

Figure 2: Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de

Located in Paris, France, ISIPCA is recognized as a leader in the perfume and

1.3 Background on brain plasticity and olfactory expertise

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 8

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 9

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 10

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 11

Olfactory expertise is the ability to identify, describe, and evaluate odors. It is

1.4 Research objectives

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 12

will be less in evocation and more in description.

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 13

2 Experiments & materials

2.1.2 Measurement time

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 14

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 15

group by providing descriptive terms that captured the common characteristics of

Table 2: Composition of different fragrance ingredients used in categorization task.

2.2 Data analysis tools and libraries

2.2.1 Softwares & tools

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 16

Figure 6: A screenshot of the Google Colab platform interface with similarity

me to quickly understand the results of my analyzes and to present them in a clear

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 17

Figure 7: A screenshot of the jamovi software interface with a two-way ANOVA

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 18

Figure 8: A schema illustrating the steps involved in text preprocessing.

First, I performed text cleaning operations to remove unwanted elements such as

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 19

variation. I also applied the lemmatization, which consists of reducing words to

3.2 Mathematical approaches

3.2.1 Quantitative analysis & descriptive statistics

3.2.2 Cosine similarity

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 20

Figure 9: Cosine similarity for vector space models.

3.2.3 Repeated measures ANOVA

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 21

Table 3: An example of a data snippet for the similarity measure using

• Normality: the dependent variable follows a normal distribution in each

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 22

3.2.4 Cohen’s kappa

3.2.5 Rand index

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 23

Figure 11: An example of calculating Rand Index between two partitions

3.3 Machine learning tools

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 24

dictionary through a set of real numbers, commonly known as word representations

Figure 12: Linear Relationships between Words from developers.google.com

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 25

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 26

work employs a softmax activation function, generating a probability dis-

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 27

ing training by comparing the predicted context word probabilities with

Figure 14: Skip-gram paradigm example demonstrates how to predict context

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 28

The GloVe model’s fundamental methodology begins by constructing a substantial

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 29

Transformers were designed to overcome the limitations of previous models, partic-

Y. Hourri The Effect of Olfactory Training on Sensory Perception 30