Sense Of Smell Investigation

The Effect of Inhibiting a Person’s Sense of Smell on their ability to identify flavors

Aim: What is the effect of inhibiting a person’s sense of smell on their sense of taste to determine flavor?

Research Question: To what extent does a person’s sense of smell affect their ability to distinguish between different flavors through their sense of taste by inhibiting their facility to use their nose when testing different flavors of jelly beans?

Hypothesis: If the sense of smell of an individual is inhibited (by blocking and unblocking their nose), then the individual’s sense of taste will be affected negatively to the point of that they are unable to clearly identity different recurring flavors (lemon, orange, watermelon, strawberry) provided

The taste test itself is highly subjective and the results are based off of the person under experimentation being able to distinguish between flavors sufficiently to some extent, however, the capability of this trait in people varies as some may be able to taste better without their sense of smell than others and thus the results may have changed, even though steps were taken to reduce this possibility of variance. Moreover, an additional weakness of this particular experiment lies in the availability for guessing and chance to take place. With only 4 choices of jelly bean, if the person lacks an idea even after they have tasted the jelly bean, they must still offer some response to the question of flavor. This pushes the individual to guess rather actually think on what exactly was the flavor that they had just tasted, and consequently the data collected because flawed by guesswork. Furthermore, the food form of jelly bean is logical in its use for this experiment, however, as with all candy they are chemically produced foods that may not reflect the actual taste sensations of each fruit flavor. Another weakness would be that not all taste sensations were tested and stimulated in this experiment, with only the sour taste sensations of lemon and oranges in addition to the sweet taste sensations of watermelon and strawberry, the experiment was limited due to there being a lacking of other taste

Moreover, in order to adjust the experiment’s liability to guesses and lack of flavor variance, a wider testing variety (salted fruits, grapefruit, banana,) to accommodate all tasting sensations and a larger quantity of flavors (from 10 to 20 of each flavor of jelly bean) should be implemented so that students taking the approach to guessing are able to take more than one jelly bean sample so that they have another option to resort to other than simply guessing and being restricted to only 2 taste sensations. Moreover, the form of food provided for the experiment can be adapted from jelly beans to cut up cubes of fruits (for salted fruits just add salt) which would better provide an accurate tasting sensation of the flavors. By improving upon these aspects, the results of the experiment will become more accurate and broaden the data collected and observed within the