Walk by a bakery, and you’ll smell fresh-baked bread. But would you smell it, if you’d never learned what bread was? “Not necessarily,” says Thomas A. Cleland, associate professor of psychology.
“The very concept of having odors that you recognize and identify, even being able to pick them out of the messy olfactory world out there, absolutely depends on learning,” says Cleland in a Cornell Research story. “I argue that learning is fundamental to even being able to smell at all.”
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David O. Brown/Johnson Museum
Nephele Sarrinikolaou '27 talks about her research for a spring curatorial seminar on Indonesian art.
Cornell Rare and Manuscript Collections
Top: Johnson chats with Earle in the A.D. White Reading Room, as University Librarian Elaine Westbrooks looks on.
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Adam Heisler (left), project manager for Cornell’s Facilities and Campus Services office, leads Peter John Loewen, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences, during a tour of McGraw Hall.
