Olfactory and visual vs. multimodal landmark processing in human wayfinding: a virtual reality experiment

ABSTRACT Recent studies suggest that the olfactory system is not as indiscriminative as previously thought. Odours can serve as useful landmark information. The current study explored recognition and wayfinding performance in 54 participants (52 at t2), who either received 18 unimodal (only visual or olfactory) or multimodal (visual-olfactory) landmark information during a learning phase in a virtual reality maze before finding their way through it. Recognition performance was assessed in a recognition task (18 targets, 18 distractors). The experiment was repeated after one month. As expected, participants showed poorer recognition performance if presented with odours compared to the other two conditions. But, recognition performance did not decline over time. Wayfinding performance was similar across all conditions. However, odours were the only condition with stable performance over time, possibly due to emotional mediation and deeper processing. Multimodal material added no value to wayfinding performance, supposedly due to higher cognitive load.