Culture, perception and the environment: the role of chemosensory perception

The perception of plant derived natural products by humans is a theoretically and practically relevant interface of botany/phytochemistry and the cultural sciences. This paper offers a theoretical overview of the field and points to the shortcomings in our knowledge about this topic. It thus focuses on the interpretation of chemosensory signals by a culture and on the way in which this sensation is cognitively structured and named, on the hedonic evaluation of particular sensations as good and bad and on the assignment of use value to particular chemosensory inputs. Simultaneously it provides the frame of reference for the four subsequent papers in this series.