Categorization of objects and faces in the infant brain and its sensitivity to maternal odor: further evidence for the role of intersensory congruency in perceptual development

Abstract

According to recent evidence, rapid categorization of natural face images in the infant brain is enhanced by concomitant maternal odor (Leleu et al., 2020). To test whether this effect is selective to faces, we recorded scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) in 4-month-old infants presented with variable exemplars of a nonface visual category - cars - appearing every 6 stimuli in 6-Hz streams of natural object images. At the same time, infants were exposed to the maternal or to a control odor context. A relatively weak neural categorization response to cars (i.e., a differential response to cars that generalizes across exemplars) was observed at 1 Hz over the right occipital cortex in both odor conditions, revealing rapid categorization of an unfamiliar object in the infant brain. However, the car categorization response was not modulated by maternal odor, suggesting that odors selectively prime neural activity in the infant visual cortex to categorize congruent incoming inputs.