Smell You Later! Multimodal Cues in Virtual Reality Enhance Object Memory: Olfactory and audio-olfactory stimuli impact recall performance in virtual reality

Abstract

As virtual reality (VR) becomes more common, it is imperative to understand the impact of sensory modalities on human perception, cognition, and behaviour. This study investigates the effects of smell, sound, and kinaesthetic feedback on delayed memory for objects in VR. In this experiment, participants (N=123) explored a maze-like forest environment displaying twelve landmark objects, consisting of visual, audiovisual, visual-olfactory, or olfactory-audiovisual congruent feedback. Participants explored the environment to find all objects in one of four omnidirectional locomotion methods providing varying degrees of sensorimotor engagement: normal walking, semi walk-in-place treadmill, walk-in-place slide-mill, or stand-in-place VR-controller teleportation. Mixed ANOVA results showed no effect of locomotion on object memory performance. A statistically significant main effect of multimodality was observed (p<.001), showing olfactory-visual (p<.001) and olfactory-audiovisual (p<.001) objects were significantly better recalled than only visual objects. Our findings suggest that objects paired with olfactory feedback are significantly more memorable compared to other modalities.