Mental health problems of students in higher education arising from academic performance, career development and interpersonal interactions are of increasing concern to society. Studies have shown that introducing natural elements into learning spaces that are in close contact with students has a positive effect on their physical and mental health recovery. Aromatherapy refers to the use of spices or aromatic plant to treat, alleviate and prevent illnesses. By stimulating the olfactory nerves, aromatic plant volatiles can have a special effect on the physiological level of human beings, thus triggering a specific emotional response and promoting physical and mental health. Jasmine, lemon and peppermint, as representative species of aromatic plants, have demonstrated their restorative potential in relevant studies. However, most of the studies on these aromatic plant species have focused on verifying the restorative effects, and there is a lack of comparisons between different species and intensities of effects, as well as a lack of studies that have shown attention to the special restorative needs of college students, such as restoration of oriented attention. The experimental procedure was divided into two main parts: the odour strength determination experiment and the attention recovery experiment. The odour intensity experiment determined the specific number of pots corresponding to three specific sizes of live aromatic plants at three levels of intensity: weak, moderate and strong. In the attention recovery experiment phase, a total of 36 participants were randomly and equally divided into three groups according to the odour intensity, and received the restorative effects of the living aromatic plants simultaneously under certain means of attention interference. Electroencephalography (EEG) can be used as a reliable indicator to assess the concentration level of the subjects attention in real-life activities, and the BrainCo wearable wireless brainwave detector, a brain-computer interface device, was used in this study to conduct real-time monitoring and data logging of the subjects’ attention state in the immersive environment. The average brainwave value during the attention test was taken as the attention index, and the larger the value represented the better the level of attention concentration and the better the effect of attention recovery. At the same time, Kessler 10 scale was applied as an assessment tool to obtain the initial mental state of the subjects before the experiment and correlate with the attention recovery of the subjects after the experiment. The results of paired T-tests on the experimental data showed that the subjects’ attention indices in the attention concentration test showed some variability among the volatiles of different aromatic plant species and different odour intensities. Six out of nine paired experiments showed that the odour of aromatic plants had a positive effect on the attention recovery of university students, of which four pairs had a significant effect, suggesting that specific living aromatic plants with appropriate odour intensity have an attention recovery effect inindoor learning spaces of universities, which is in line with the findings of aromatherapy research. Jasmine and mint showed more significant attention-restoring effects at both low and moderate odour intensities, whereas lemon had a non-significant attention-restoring effect only at low odour intensities, and at higher odour intensities, it decreased the subjects’ concentration level. Only a few groups showed significant differences in the attention recovery results under each initial psychological condition, and overall, the initial psychological condition of the subjects had a limited effect on the attention recovery effect. At the end of the experiment, further regression analyses of the attention indices of the three living aromatic plants at different odour intensities were carried out to derive the optimal number of configurations of living aromatic plants under the conditions of the experimental site. The curve fitting results can be estimated that in the study space used in this study (8.0m long, 5.6m wide and 4.0 m high), the optimal number of single-species configurations are 5 pots of jasmine (in full bloom, de-potted to a height of about 25 cm and crown spread of about 25 cm) and 4 pots of scented peppermint (branching and foliage, de-potted to a height of about 10 cm, and crown spread of about 25 cm), whereas the results of the lemon regression analysis fitting showed that the F test results were all non-significant (p>0.05). Taken together, the results of the study showed that jasmine and fragrant mint were more effective in restoring the attention of university student groups with study tasks, and it is recommended that they should be deployed in appropriate quantities in indoor study spaces in higher education institutions for healing purposes. In the future, the recovery benefits of aromatic plants for college students can be further explored by setting more types of aromatic plants, controlling the duration of odour perception, and quantifying the odour concentration, in order to build a better indoor healing environment on college campuses.