Czy Proust miał rację? Zapachy jako wskazówki pamięciowe

Was Proust right? Odors as memory cuesIn scientific publications concerning olfactory memory the notion of the “Proust Effect” is often used, meaning that odors have a positive influence on retrieval of memories. In the first part of the paper the context effect is presented, as well as data from studies where odors were used as retrieval memory cues. In the second part the results of the author’s research is presented. The main aim of the project was to verify whether odors can serve as efficient memory cues. Two kinds of odors were used – pleasant and unpleasant, to check if the efficiency of odor cues depends on the evoked emotions. The groups were also differentiated by the context in which learning and retrieval took place: same or different. The obtained results were analyzed twice, as “objective” and “subjective”. In the first set of analyses results the formal grouping of subjects was taken into account, in the second grouping was based on the subjective appraisal of odors and odor context (pleasant/unpleasant; same/different). It appeared that subjects learning and retrieving in the same odor conditions (assessed subjectively as unpleasant) reproduced more words than subjects who thought that the conditions of learning and retrieval were different. In the discussion the concept of context dependent memory is called upon and the influence of activation on learning is presented