Alright, maybe I'm just cynical and jaded, but this was put on by Proctor & Gamble, and I get the feeling this was just made for the purposes of having a study they could link to for claims that their new scent plug in can improve memory retention in certain groups of people. The fact that the total sample size was less than 50 and split between control and variable means that about 20 people of different age groups participated. That's not much for a study. Also, the control group actually did worse during the experiment than normal, which leads me to believe that the control wasn't handled very well, or that natural deviance in data is greater than the "improvement" they claim. Either way, I'm dubious. It feels like it's destined for a fine print in a commercial that shows between reruns of Law and Order.

For anyone interested in what they used:

"Individuals assigned to the olfactory enrichment group were provided with an odorant diffuser (Diffuser World) and 7 essential oil odorants (rose, orange, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, rosemary, and lavender; from The Essential Oil Company, Portland, OR) in identical glass vials that each fit into the diffuser. They were asked to turn on the diffuser when they went to bed, and the odorant was released into the air during the night for 2 h when they first went to sleep. They rotated through the different odorants each night."