No abstract

The social facilitation effect is a well-researched phenomenon in social psychology that has recently been reproduced through the use of virtual humans. This finding provides opportunities to increase certain human behaviors remotely, which could be crucial in behavior modification. The purpose of the current study was to replicate these findings. Through three manipulations aimed at mimicking this social facilitation effect demonstrated in previous research, no significant effects on performance could be replicated. This suggests that this social psychology principle may not be applicable in a human-machine interaction paradigm.

The sense of smell is uniquely tied to brain regions involved in memory. Previous research shows that introducing the scent of a household cleaner into the experimental room will elicit more cleaning behaviors and increase recall for cleaning-related words. However, these findings are limited to retrospective memory. Prospective memory is remembering to complete a task in the future and accounts for up to 80% of every day memory problems. Because of the consequences of prospective memory failures, it is vital to find ways to reduce these failures. While scent has been shown to modify behavior in a retrospective memory context, little is known about the effects of scent on prospective memory. The current study seeks to extend previous research on scent and memory into a prospective memory paradigm.