More and more companies are paying attention to the new frontier of scent research, a field that is rapidly expanding and generating new strategies.
Seeing and touching are no longer enough, the smell becomes an exciting new dimension. There is a relationship between olfaction and brain, in fact scents can influence our cognitive functions and mental states. They have the ability to stimulate several areas of the brain, evoking emotions and memories.
In this regard, a study was conducted to investigate, through the use of electroencephalography (EEG) and virtual reality (VR), the impact of lavender and lemon scents, associated respectively with relaxation and activation, on the mental effort of participants when listening to two messages: one generic (welcome message) and one informative (slowdown message). These messages were heard during a simulated VR train journey from Rome to Milan.
VR made it possible to create a highly immersive environment reducing complications such as: the high cost of a real journey, the impossibility to control environmental variables (background noises, distracting elements, etc), limiting the times. The EEG was used to analyze the participants' mental effort.
Results showed a significant increase in mental effort among subjects exposed to lavender compared to those exposed to lemon scent while listening to the slowdown message. Considering the relaxing properties of lavender, the results suggest that a calm state creates the condition for better processing of the information provided by slowdown message. The impact of the smell also occurs even if people are not always aware of it. Despite the fact that all subjects were exposed to a specific smell (lemon or lavender) during the experiment, more than half of the sample (57%) were unaware of the presence of a smell and only 21% correctly identified the specific fragrance to which they had been exposed.
This research shows how the use of the EEG is important to understand the cognitive effects of scents, which are impossible to observe verbally. The combined approach of neuroscience and virtual reality proved valuable and may pave the way for future applications to measure the impact of olfactory stimuli in marketing and communication activities.
Article written in collaboration with: Simona Ceccarelli, Valeria Mantelli and Olivia Ramdin.
Cite
Mancini, M.; Cherubino, P.; Cartocci, G.; Martinez, A.; Borghini, G.; Guastamacchia, E.; di Flumeri, G.; Rossi, D.; Modica, E.; Menicocci, S.; Lupo, V.; Trettel, A.; Babiloni, F. Forefront Users’ Experience Evaluation by Employing Together Virtual Reality and Electroencephalography: A Case Study on Cognitive Effects of Scents. Brain Sci. 2021,11, 256. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11020256
