Witnesses can catch criminals by smell: Study

London, June 11: Move over, sniffer dogs! People who witness a crime are able to identify criminals by their smell, according to a new study which found that humans have the ability to distinguish individuals by their unique body odour.

“Police often use human eye-witnesses, and even ear-witnesses, in lineups but, to date, there have not been any human nose-witnesses,” said Mats Olsson from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

“We wanted to see if humans can identify criminals by their body odour,” said Olsson.

Dogs have been used to identify criminals through body odour identification in court, but it is commonly thought that the human sense of smell is inferior to that of other mammals.

However, research shows that humans have the ability to distinguish individuals by their unique body odour. Our olfactory sense is often associated with emotional processing and is directly linked to the areas of the brain associated with emotion and memory; the hippocampus and the amygdala, researchers said.

To find out more about human odour memory following stressful events, researchers investigated how well we identify body odour in a forensic setup.

In their first study, participants watched video clips of people committing violent crimes, accompanied by a body odour that they were told belonged to the perpetrator.

They also watched neutral videos, with a similar setup.