Episodic memory and recognition are influenced by cues' sensory modality: comparing odours, music and faces using virtual reality

Most everyday experiences are multisensory, and all senses can trigger the conscious re-experience of unique personal events embedded in their specific spatio-temporal context. Yet, little is known about how a cue's sensory modality influences episodic memory, and which step of this process is impacted. This study investigated recognition and episodic memory across olfactory, auditory and visual sensory modalities in a laboratory-ecological task using a non-immersive virtual reality device. At encoding, participants freely and actively explored unique and rich episodes in a three-room house where boxes delivered odours, musical pieces and pictures of face. At retrieval, participants were presented with modality-specific memory cues and were told to 1) recognise encoded cues among distractors and, 2) go to the room and select the box in which they encountered them at encoding. Memory performance and response times revealed that music and faces outperformed odours in recognition memory, but that odours and faces outperformed music in evoking encoding context. Interestingly, correct recognition of music and faces was accompanied by more profound inspirations than correct rejection. By directly comparing memory performance across sensory modalities, our study demonstrated that despite limited recognition, odours are powerful cues to evoke specific episodic memory retrieval.