ASU Researcher Disputes Claim that Humans Can Distinguish 1 Trillion Odors (IMAGE)
Caption
Gerkin and Castro showed that the number of smells estimated in a 2014 paper published in Science was heavily dependent on the number of participants in the experiment, and on the strictness of a statistical test that paper employed. In a new paper published in eLife, the pair show that by choosing alternative values for those parameters -- ones that could reasonably have been used in a parallel experiment -- it becomes possible to estimate any number of smells from the data, including the most or fewest possible from that paper's framework. Thus, the value the original paper did obtain (*) is just one of the many possible defensible estimates.
Credit
Rick Gerkin and Jason Castro
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