Multisensory Integration: Effect of lighting, sound and ambient scenting to support workers’ activities in the presentation room

Abstract

Multimodal stimuli are believed to provide greater and richer perceptional experience than that is caused by unisensory information. This study looks at the nature of crossmodal interactions between visual, auditory and olfactory modalities which occur in the same time and space in endeavor to find out the optimal combinations of lighting, sound and ambient scenting to psychologically support different activities in the presentation room. The experiment was conducted in the actual presentation room where 4 types of light settings, high-resolution nature sound and 2 types of ambient scenting were manipulated. 5-Scale Semantic Differential evaluation with 28 KANSEI words was conducted for 24 space samples with unimodal, bimodal and trimodal combinations. Later applied Principal Component Analysis to compare semantic differences in the evaluation structure that was reflected by how unimodal vs bimodal vs trimodal cues from these products created single or combined effects on people’s feelings in the space. The visual cues from lighting seemed to have created greater variance than the ones created by crossmodal interactions of auditory-olfactory stimuli, however, each constituent sense modality contributes differently to the integrated perception. This method can be used for verbalizing features of how each modality that occurs simultaneously functions in the integrated experience. It also enables us to select the optimal combinations of products with sensory cues such as lighting, sound and ambient scenting in the space design to support workers’ activities.