Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans (2006)
nature.com
nature.com
Similarly, a human smell factoid is humans are more sensitive to the smell of petrichor (fresh rain on a dry area) than sharks are to blood!
> Humans are an appealing animal model [...] because they can follow task instructions and accurately report behavioral strategies. Humans also tolerate manipulations, such as nostril occlusion, that may aggravate even well-trained dogs
So that part seems... painfully obvious?
I can - and do - throw a ChuckIt ball across a field. If she does not see the ball bounce and rest she relies totally on scent. She will literally pass by a bright orange/blue ball which is sitting at rest on short green grass or a sprinkling of white snow. She will hunt that ball, nose to the ground until she finds it.
Two days ago I threw the ball, I was on an adjacent path, into a field. Because of the sun I missed that it bounced oddly, out of the field and into a wide grass verge. Both she and I had no clue at all where the ball was.
That's annoying when a ball costs around £5.
I walked down the path and shrugged my shoulders to her. She knows that means "I have no idea where it is".
She sniffed around the field, found (what I assume was the first bounce/scent), found the second, then ran out of the field, back to the path and found the ball deep in long grass. No errors, direct line.
I may well be 'as capable' but those two words mean diddly (squat. Sorry!)
"As capable"
Are we not all born "as capable" of many things yet the nature/nuture kicks in?
She would run to where she saw it land and roll, then sniff around and find & return the exact pinecone I had thrown :)
This is even more clear if you roll the ball and it can leave a trail line down the grass.
He gives a long and insightful interview to Huberman here:
How to Escape a Police Sniffing Dog - Mark Rober
I'd click on a "Humans may be just as capable as dogs at scent-tracking" link, and see if it is justified (no, really, I won't take it as granted just because it is a HN submission title).
But I don't know what to do with a "Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans (2006)". I probably won't even click on it, and if I did, I wouldn't find anything interesting.
I don't get what you mean before it, but I don't think I want or can argue about it. I just generally prefer edited submission titles, for example in this submission or in a benchmark result page, or such.
He would act as a bloodhound, smelling books, then having people handle the book without him present, then identifying which book a person handled by smelling their hands. I believe he did it also with playing cards after identifying the differences in the way people's hands smelled.
That doesn’t sound right.
Dogs seem to be great at detecting odors in low concentrations. Once they are detectable by humans, however, it seems we have some pretty good olfactory skills.
The unstated bit of this is that humans are probably less good at scent differentiation, which is another factor in olfactory "capability," but not strictly the same as the ability to track a scent (though you could argue that if you're more likely to follow a subtly wrong scent, you're less capable -- something not captured by the studies which have looked at this, I don't think).