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The aim of the study presented here is to examine the effects of instructions on the perception of a sequence of interior car sounds in three different conditions. In each condition, participants listened to the same sound sequence, but the type of information given during the instruction phase, prior to the listening test, were different. In the first condition, a group of participants listens to the sound sequence without any external information except that the sound sequence was recorded inside a car. In the second condition, another group of participants was informed by a text of the successive events that are presented in the sound sequence. In the third condition, participants were informed first by the same text as in condition 2, and then by several pictures showing the different steps that could be heard from the beginning to the end of the sound sequence. Each of the three groups of subjects participated in three tasks: an identification task, a recognition task, and a semantic judgment task using twelve verbal attributes. We assessed how listeners’ judgments of the sound sequence were affected by external information. Results show that the effect is dependant on the type of verbal attribute and on the combination of external information. The verbal information, provided without visual information in condition 2, improves the identification and recognition scores, and thus influences positively the comprehension of the sound sequence and the feeling of immersion. The added visual information, in condition 3, does not change the identification scores, but affects judgements on the pleasantness scale. It appears that the perception of the sound sequence was influenced by visual cues. This study reveals that the format of instructions influences perceptive judgments of the sound sequence tested, but globally factors accounting for the participants’ perception across the three conditions are not modified.

The experiments conducted in this research aimed to increase our understanding of olfactory properties and classify them hierarchically through entailment. The research objective was to build an odor classification based on internal knowledge (i.e. mental context). Twelve floral scents were described freely by 60 participants. First, three sensory judges undertook a semantic analysis of the 1145 olfactory terms gathered. Secondly, a study of the entailment between olfactory properties was conducted using 42 subjects working on four lists of terms describing the characteristics of floral perfumes. The results confirmed the hypothesis that olfactory properties show tree-like structure. This allowed us to propose a classification system composed of two superordinate categories: First, objects , being olfactory sources, constitute the first category and are considered as olfactory properties themselves (i.e. civilization , food and natural sources ). Second non-objects properties are those applicable to a diversity of objects: (i.e. properties , such as objects' physical state: sensory, intensity, space, time) and those related to the subject (as personal feelings and value judgments). Based on these results, it appears that olfactory properties can be organized as a semantic network in line with the general theory of categorization.