Odor-evoked autobiographical memories: age and gender differences along the life span.

Odors are powerful in bringing back old and vivid memories bearing emotional content. This inherent hedonic property of olfactory stimuli makes this sensory modality particularly suitable for studying autobiographical memory. In the present work, adolescents (first experiment), young adults (second experiment), and elderly (third experiment) of both sexes were asked to smell 10 familiar odorants and to report if these odorants evoked personal autobiographical memories or referential memories (i.