Inclusive Sensory Reconfiguration：Exploring How Olfactory Cues Influence Civic Engagement Among Visually Impaired Persons

The study hypothesized that the presence and semantic consistency of olfactory cues would affect judgment accuracy, response time, cognitive load, and subjective experience. It was also expected that the effects of olfactory cues would depend on their relationship with the task category rather than on odor type alone.The dataset was collected through a controlled experiment using waste sorting as a representative rule-based civic task.

Participants classified waste items into recyclable, non-recyclable, and hazardous categories under three conditions: a no-odor baseline condition, an odor–category congruent condition, and an odor–category incongruent condition. Each participant completed 108 trials across three experimental rounds. The dataset includes behavioral measures, including classification accuracy and response time; questionnaire data, including NASA-TLX cognitive load ratings and Self-Assessment Manikin ratings; electroencephalography data used to examine cognitive load-related neural activity; and qualitative data from post-task interviews.The data indicate that olfactory cues can enter the judgment process as implicit informational resources rather than functioning only as emotional or atmospheric stimuli.