Can smelling a lesson’s scent again during sleep help students remember what they learned?

Details

Sleep helps learned information become more firmly established in memory. A scent linked to learning can serve as a cue to bring that information back into activity during sleep. Researchers tested this approach with complex classroom material, such as a history lesson, rather than adding another study session. Students learned in the presence of an odor, then received a session of odor-cued memory reactivation during their first night of sleep at home. The researchers reported improved consolidation of the learned material. This supports the possibility of using sleep cues outside a laboratory, but the abstract does not report students’ ages, sample size, comparison conditions, the size of the improvement, or how long it lasted.