Ask children to draw after they have enjoyed a scented exhibition. Will their pictures also show their impressions of the smells? One study tried to capture experiences that are difficult to describe in words through drawings and colors.
In 2023, Kucirkova and Speed studied an exhibition based on The Three Little Pigs at a children’s museum in Norway. Twenty-eight children aged 4½–8 took part. The aim was not to assign scores to whether adding scent improved learning, but to examine closely how children responded to smells in a space containing a story, colors, sounds, and things to touch.
Five scent boxes within a story
The children followed a trail lined with the pigs’ houses and other features. The exhibition included props they could touch and sounds such as the wolf’s voice. Wooden boxes were fixed at various points along the route, with lids children could open to smell what was inside.
The colors of the handles and the plates inside the boxes were chosen in combination with the scents and characters. Mother Pig’s station was yellow and smelled of a pigpen and excrement. Pretty Pig’s was pink, with fruit and candy; Reading Pig’s was green, with pine and forest; and Clever Pig’s was brown, with chocolate and cocoa. The wolf’s was black and smelled of wet dog and animal fur. All were scent mixtures made for the exhibition.
During the research period before the official opening, 14 girls and 14 boys from two nearby kindergartens visited in two groups. Researchers examined their responses afterward through pointing, conversation, and drawing.
Pointing to favorite smells, drawing favorite characters
After the visit, smaller versions of the exhibition’s scent boxes were placed on a table. Researchers asked children to point to boxes with smells they liked and disliked, and recorded their words. If the color did not help them remember the smell, they were encouraged to open the box and smell it again.
For drawing, children received paper printed with Mother Pig and the three little pigs. They could color their favorite character and draw freely on the same sheet or another one. There were seven pencil colors: the five corresponding to the boxes, plus orange and purple, which were not used in the exhibition. This was therefore not a task of depicting smell alone in an abstract way; it also involved coloring a favorite character.
Even the chocolate box could smell unpleasant
Pointing and conversation suggested a tendency to like the pink box and dislike the brown, black, and yellow ones. The pink smell was associated with candy and strawberries, among other things. Although the brown box contained a chocolate-type scent, it was sometimes interpreted as smelling of excrement, just like the black and yellow boxes.
Not every child reacted alike, however. Some said they liked the brown box; others chose no favorite and disliked several boxes. Their explanations mainly described whether a smell was good or identified what it smelled like.
The authors consider whether brown suggested excrement or rotten things, or whether the first, yellow box influenced subsequent experiences. Children laughing together and talking about bad smells may also have intensified their responses.
This was not an experiment that varied color and smell separately. Without a condition presenting the same scent in a differently colored box, it cannot establish that brown caused chocolate to smell unpleasant. These observations arose from the exhibition as a whole, including colors, story, presentation order, the scents themselves, and friends’ reactions.
Drawings reflected characters more than scents
Twenty-six of the 28 children completed the drawing task. Four children’s drawings clearly matched the exhibition characters’ colors, four showed partial matches, and 18 used different colors. Researchers could not identify features representing smells in the drawings. Judging from the pictures, Mother Pig and Clever Pig were popular characters.
This does not mean the children failed to smell the scents or forgot them. They did express likes and dislikes through pointing and conversation. The authors suggest that this coloring and drawing activity more readily reflected preferences for the story and characters, and the pleasure of drawing itself, than associations with scent.
To capture olfactory experience, the connection between the question and the smell needs to be clearer, for example by asking what a smell brings to mind immediately after smelling it. This was an important methodological lesson from the study.
When adding scent, consider its combination with other senses
For the researchers, brown and chocolate were a meaningful match. But the meanings the children at the exhibition associated with brown were not necessarily the same. Drawing on multisensory interactions, the authors discuss the possibility that visual impressions shaped how smells were received and that vision took priority.
The paper also discusses possible roles for the boxes’ shapes, the tactile experience of opening their lids, and the intensity of the smell at that moment. These factors, too, were not examined separately. A case study of 28 children at one exhibition does not establish a mechanism applying to children in general. During pointing, children could sometimes also see others’ answers.
The authors’ recommendation for museum design is not simply to increase sensory stimulation, but to consider what colors and scents mean, how they support one another, and when they conflict. Children’s language and cognitive development and sensitivity to stimulation also need consideration, with a manageable sensory balance sought for each exhibition.
Summary
The drawings in this study reflected responses to characters and the story more than the scent features researchers had hoped to capture. Pointing and conversation, meanwhile, conveyed preferences and interpretations of smells that the creators had not anticipated.
Creating a scented exhibition involves more than adding a smell. It is received as one experience together with colors, story, and other people. Understanding that experience from children’s perspectives requires looking beyond drawings to questions and actions explicitly connected to smell.
References
Kucirkova, N. I., & Speed, L. J. (2023). Children’s multisensory experiences in museums: how olfaction interacts with color. Frontiers in Education, 8, 1242708. DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2023.1242708 / Full text. Original article: © 2023 Kucirkova and Speed, CC BY.
