Even the smell of coffee may fuel cognitive performance
There’s increasing consensus that drinking coffee is mostly good for you. Now, a study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology suggests that the scent of coffee alone may help cognitive performance.
There’s increasing consensus that drinking coffee is mostly good for you. Now, a study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology suggests that the scent of coffee alone may help cognitive performance.
The researchers administered 10-question GMAT algebra tests in a computer lab to about 100 university business students, divided into two groups. One group took the test in the presence of an ambient coffee-like scent, while a second, demographically similar control group took the same test—but in an unscented room. The researchers found that the group in the coffee-smelling room scored significantly higher on the test.
The researchers wanted to know more. Could the first group’s boost in quick thinking have been somehow related to noticing the coffee-like scent on some level, and believing they would perform better, in a classic example of placebo effect?
“We wanted to see whether people expect a coffee scent would improve performance because they believe it would lead to higher levels of physiological arousal, an effect traditionally associated with the actual ingestion of caffeine,” said lead researcher Adriana Madzharov, professor at Stevens School of Business.
The team designed a follow-up survey, conducted among a group of more than 200 new subjects, quizzing participants on beliefs about various scents and their perceived effects on human performance. The result? Participants did believe they would feel more physiologically stimulated in coffee-scented rooms than in unscented or florally scented environments.
“It’s not just that the coffee-like scent helped people in our study perform better on analytical tasks, which was already interesting,” said Madzharov. “But they also thought they would do better, and we demonstrated that this expectation was at least partly responsible for their improved performance. In short, smelling a coffee-like scent, which has no caffeine in it, still has a placebo effect similar to drinking coffee.”