How scent impact memory and forgetting

Abstract: In this experiment it was investigated how scent affect the memory. Encoding information in the same context as retrieving it has been suggested to be beneficial for memory, earlier research has mostly explored how environmental contextual cues affects the memory. In this research the contextual cue was created by a presentation of a scent. The participants were presented with two lists of words, during the encoding of the first list all the participants were presented with a scent, half of the group was directed to forget the first list straight after encoding and the other half to keep remembering the list. For the second list no one was presented with a scent. In the retrieval of both lists half of each group was reinstated with the scent they were presented with at encoding and the other half without the scent (control group). The data were analysed with univariate ANOVAs and significant effects were followed up with independent-samples t-test. The results were that participants that were reinstated with the scent were thought to remember more than the others, however there was only a significant difference in the forget condition with reinstatement, where they remembered less than in the other conditions.