A team of researchers has made a new and astonishing discovery: infants can recognise faces based on their mother’s scent. Researchers from various institutes conducted a study to understand how babies use their mother’s scent to perceive faces. The results of the study are astonishing and unprecedented.
The researchers found that this ability improves greatly in infants between four and 12 months of age. Older infants, however, can use primarily visual information to perceive faces and do not require simultaneous cues. Dr Arnaud Leleu, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Centre for Taste, Smell and Nutrition Sciences (CSGA) at the Université de Bourgogne, explained: “I have long been interested in how sensory perception works in the human brain.”
“Despite its apparent simplicity (e.g. we open our eyes to see), perception is a complex neurocognitive ability that arises from previous experiences with different stimuli coming from all the senses simultaneously,” Dr Leleu said. He added that the way a toddler’s brain processes the multisensory stimuli is important for understanding perception with the different senses and how it develops in adulthood.
Dr Leleu researched to investigate how the development of visual perception is shaped by the sense of smell in the infant’s brain. The study found that rapid face perception, which increases with maternal odour, decreases as infants grow older and can efficiently perceive faces using visual cues alone.
He explained that early exposure to simultaneous sensory inputs from multiple modalities is important to enhance perceptual learning in infants. “Together with the large body of research on multisensory perception in infants, our findings demonstrate the importance of early exposure to simultaneous sensory inputs from multiple modalities for perceptual learning,” Dr Leleu added.
“Such early exposure to repeated intersensory associations is also a building block for later development of higher-level skills such as semantic memory, language and conceptual thinking. Therefore, it is important to expose infants to a variety of cues to the same objects as early as possible,” he added.