Smell and score

The scent of coffee alone may help people perform better on the analytical portion of the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT), a computer adaptive test required by many business schools, a study claims.

The work, led by Professor Adriana Madzharov from Stevens Institute of Technology in the US, not only highlights the hidden force of scent and the cognitive boost it may provide on analytical tasks, but also the expectation that students will perform better on those tasks.

“It’s not just that the coffeelike scent helped people perform better on analytical tasks, which was already interesting. But they also thought they would do better,” said Madzharov.

“We demonstrated that this expectation was at least partly responsible for their improved performance,” she said.

Smelling a coffee-like scent, which has no caffeine in it, has an effect similar to that of drinking coffee, suggesting a placebo effect of coffee scent, researchers said.

In their work published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Madzharov and her team administered a 10question GMAT algebra test in a computer lab to about 100 undergraduate business students, divided into two groups. One group took the test in the presence of an ambient coffeelike scent, while a control group took the same test — but in an unscented room.

They found that the group in the coffee-smelling room scored significantly higher on the test.