The purpose of this study was to elucidate the reciprocal effect of olfactory-visual associations on olfactory and visual processing in the human brain using fMRI. Young, cognitively healthy participants underwent 3 separate olfactory-visual association paradigms, including either neutral, semantically congruent, or semantically incongruent visual cues. The data revealed significant olfactory activation in the POC and visual areas in response to visual cues, regardless of semantic meaning (neutral, congruent, or incongruent). This reciprocally increased activation in the POC and visual cortex during olfactory-visual cue pairing and subsequent visual cue presentations may suggest an intrinsic functional mechanism for multisensory associative learning.
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