Augmented Reality to Assess Short-Term Spatial Memory: A Comparative Study of Olfactory, Visual, and Tactile Stimuli

This work presents an Augmented Reality application based on SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) for the assessment of spatial memory involving olfactory stimuli. A study was carried with twenty-five adults. The participants of the study completed two phases (a learning phase and an evaluation phase). In the learning phase, the participants physically walk around a real environment and have to remember the location of olfactory stimuli. In the evaluation phase, the participants have to remember the location of olfactory stimuli learned in the previous phase. The data of this study is compared with those obtained in a previous study involving visual and tactile stimuli (N = 47). The results indicate that the olfactory stimuli did not offer significant differences with respect to the visual stimuli for the correct placement of stimuli and the number of attempts in the evaluation phase. The olfactory stimuli had better results compared to the tactile stimuli for the correct placement of the stimuli in the evaluation phase and there was a significantly lower number of attempts. The time required in the learning and evaluation phases was greater for the olfactory stimuli compared to the other two stimuli, which is justified by the physical and mechanical characteristics of each of the stimuli. The results show that this type of memory task for the olfactory stimuli is independent of gender and age. All of these results suggest that olfactory stimuli are valid stimuli for assessing the memorization of olfactory-spatial associations and are similar to the level of visual stimuli and better than tactile stimuli.