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I have to tell you about the most astonishing study I've read recently-
Anat Arzi et al. (2014) showed people the film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer – and found that viewers tended to sniff whenever the film characters sniffed!
The participants didn't know that anyone was paying attention to their sniffing. They were placed in an “odor-clean” room - and were told that the purpose of the session was to calibrate physiological recording devices (among them, nasal air flow). And it was explained that the film was being shown just to stave off boredom.
Within the first hour of this film, there are 28 instances in which a character sniffs. Here are a few examples …
This compelling study was published last year (2014) in Chemical Senses, an Oxford University Press journal.
The neurobiologists found that when the film characters sniffed, the viewers also tended to take a sniff - even though there was no aroma to take in.
And the most striking finding to me was that the “sniffing effect” was strongest in film scenes in which the participants only heard a character sniff - but didn’t see the object that was being sniffed.
This was demonstrated by measuring “sniff duration” – the length of the sniff. It was longest in response to only hearing a character sniff, shorter for hearing the sniff and seeing the object being sniffed at, and shortest when only the image of someone sniffing was shown without the sound of the sniff.
How can we explain this?
Arzi and colleagues frame their findings with respect to a human orienting response - driven by the need to seek information that could be important for day-to-day functioning and even for survival. For instance, if you were to see people staring intently in one direction, your natural response would be to follow their gaze to see what they are looking at. (Even infants engage in this gaze-following behavior [see Ross, Kang, Darwin, 2007]).
Orienting to the gaze direction of other people is important for daily operations such as smoothly coordinating a group conversation, or for an infant to learn the names of animals at a zoo. It can be critical to physical survival: if a stranger's gaze alerts you to a huge boulder that's about to break loose, you may avoid being flattened!
Here, we may be observing a similar orienting response with respect to smell rather than sight. Neurobiologists refer to this as "social chemosignaling" - giving rise to behaviors such as the tendency to sniff when seeing others of our own species sniffing. And the response may be so strong that it's not suppressed even when watching a film, in which no aroma is being released.
The focus of Arzi et al.'s research is not on film but on olfactory behavior. Nevertheless, this study suggests that the film experience may be more multisensory and embodied than we think. And it alerts us to the social signals that may be at play even while watching a movie.
As it highlights the role of auditory cues on the film experience, this was one of the studies I presented during the recent Keynote Address I gave at "Music and the Moving Image", a conference hosted each spring at NYU. (Please see the note below about this wonderful conference and associated journal).
- © 2015 Siu-Lan Tan PhD
** CONFERENCE **
The conference for which I served as the Keynote speaker this year was "Music and the Moving Image" - a vibrant conference on film music and sound held each spring at NYU, attracting film music scholars from around the world. The intriguing May 2015 abstracts to papers are linked here, and the associated journal with the same name is linked here. If you're interested in music and the moving image (film, television, video games etc), I highly recommend both!
- © Dr Siu-Lan Tan is co-author of Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance and co-editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia. My BLOG on Psychology Today is linked here and the most popular post to date is this one linked here.
