Bad Smells Make Memories Stronger

“These results demonstrate that bad smells are capable of producing memory enhancements in both adolescents and adults, pointing to new ways to study how we learn from and remember positive and negative experiences,” explains Catherine Hartley, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Learning and Memory. “Because our findings spanned different age groups, this study suggests that aversive odors might be used in the future to examine emotional learning and memory processes across development,” adds Alexandra Cohen, an NYU postdoctoral fellow and the paper’s lead author.The impact of negative experiences on memory has long been shown–and is familiar to us. A day later, researchers tested participants’ memory for the images.Their findings showed that both adolescents and adults showed better memory specifically for images paired with the bad smell 24 hours after they saw these images.

Source: www.technologynetworks.com