New research shows coffee betters analytical and mathematical skills
Drinking coffee seems to have its perks.
In addition to the physical boost it delivers, coffee may lessen our risk of heart disease, diabetes and dementia. Coffee may even help us live longer. Now, there’s more good news: research at Stevens Institute of Technology reveals that the scent of coffee alone may help people perform better on the analytical portion of the Graduate Management Aptitude Test, or GMAT, a computer adaptive test required by many business schools.
The group in the coffee-smelling room scored significantly higher on the test
The work, led by Stevens School of Business professor Adriana Madzharov, 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. Madzharov, with colleagues at Temple University and Baruch College, recently published their findings in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
“It’s not just that the coffee-like scent helped people perform better on analytical tasks, which was already interesting,” says Madzharov. “But they also thought they would do better, and we demonstrated that this expectation was at least partly responsible for their improved performance.”
In short, 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.
In their work, Madzharov and her team administered a 10-question 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 coffee-like 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.
