Jonas Olofsson
Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Psychology, Stockholm University
Jonas Olofsson’s research interests concern psychological and biological aspects of human
perception, emotion and memory, with a focus on olfaction (smell). He received his under-
graduate and doctoral degrees (2003 and 2008) from Umeå University and has been Associate
Professor of Psychology at Stockholm University since 2009. In his doctoral dissertation,
Olofsson showed that olfactory function was impaired in old, healthy individuals who carried
a gene variant associated with Alzheimer’s disease (Olofsson et al., ‘Odor Identification Impair-
ment in Elderly ApoE-e4 Carriers Is Independent of Dementia’, Neurobiology of Aging, 2010),
and those individuals suffered from a larger cognitive decline in the next five years (Olofsson
et al., ‘Odor Identification Deficit as a Predictor of Five-Year Global Cognitive Change: Inter-
active Effects with Age and ApoE-e4’, Behavior Genetics, 2009). These findings indicate that
olfactory impairment in the elderly might be a precursor of cognitive impairment in individuals
at high risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
As a postdoctoral Fellow at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago,
Olofsson used neuroimaging and cognitive experimental techniques to show a set of brain regions
specialized in linking a smell to verbal and knowledge-based associations to create a meaningful
olfactory experience (Olofsson et al., ‘A Cortical Pathway to Olfactory Naming: Evidence from
Primary Progressive Aphasia’, Brain, 2013).
As a Pro Futura Scientia scholar, Olofsson investigates the relationships
between olfactory and
memory loss, as well as effects of training memory using odors (Olofsson
et al., ‘Long-term
episodic memory decline is associated with olfactory deficits only in carriers
of ApoE-ε4’,
Neuropsychologia, 2016).
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2017-18.