Vicky Zhang¹, Eli Wakefield¹, Leslie Kay¹, Wilma Bainbridge¹; ¹University of Chicago

Memorability, or the likelihood that a stimulus will be remembered, is an intrinsic stimulus property that shows strong consistency across observers. This consistency has been demonstrated across diverse stimulus types, with people reliably remembering and forgetting the same faces (Bainbridge et al., 2013), objects (Kramer et al., 2023), words (Xie et al., 2020), and voices (Revsine et al., 2025). However, memorability research has focused almost exclusively on visual and auditory modalities, leaving it unclear whether such intrinsic consistency extends to olfaction, whose direct pathway from the olfactory bulb to hippocampal memory circuits may offer unique insight into the broader mechanisms underlying memorability across modalities (Aggleton & Mishkin, 1986; Herz & Schooler, 2004). Using twelve intensity-matched monomolecular odorants, we investigated whether people reliably remember and forget the same odors and whether perceptual factors like pleasantness influence odor memorability. Adult participants smelled each odor during incidental encoding, completed a continuous recognition task, and rated pleasantness, intensity, and confidence. Correct recognition scores varied widely across items (approximately 0.18–0.91), with some odors reliably remembered and others consistently forgotten, revealing robust stimulus specific and observer consistent odor memorability that parallels intrinsic memorability effects documented in vision and audition. We next examined perceptual predictors of these item-level differences. Pleasantness showed negative but non significant relationships with both corrected recognition and confidence. Intensity, while only weakly related to corrected recognition, showed a significant positive association with recognition confidence, suggesting that perceptual salience increases metacognitive certainty without proportionally improving objective memory. Together, these findings demonstrate the intrinsic memorability of odors and show that neither pleasantness nor intensity alone accounts for these effects.This work extends the concept of memorability to olfaction, revealing both cross-modal similarities and differences, and mirroring visual findings showing that stimulus aesthetics do not reliably predict memorability (Isola et al., 2011).