Abstract
This study investigated whether an odor can affect infants' attention to visually presented objects and whether it can selectively direct visual gaze at visual targets as a function of their meaning. Four-month-old infants (n = 48) were exposed to their mother's body odors while their visual exploration was recorded with an eye-movement tracking system. Two groups of infants, who were assigned to either an odor condition or a control condition, looked at a scene composed of still pictures of faces and cars. As expected, infants looked longer at the faces than at the cars but this spontaneous preference for faces was significantly enhanced in presence of the odor. As expected also, when looking at the face, the infants looked longer at the eyes than at any other facial regions, but, again, they looked at the eyes significantly longer in the presence of the odor. Thus, 4-month-old infants are sensitive to the contextual effects of odors while looking at faces. This suggests that early social attention to faces is mediated by visual as well as non-visual cues.
Highlights
IntroductionThis is evident from findings indicating that arbitrary odorants can elicit autonomic reactions or motor responses in infants ([1,2]; reviewed in [3,4])
In addition to the main effect of visual stimulus, we found that the odor condition interacted significantly with the type of visual stimulus presented [F(1,46) = 5.60; p,0.025]
Even though infants exhibited an overall preference for the female face, the group of infants exposed to the worn t-shirt looked longer at the female face than the group of infants exposed to the control t-shirt: the odor group looked nearly twice as long at the female face than at the car picture as compared to the control group (Face: 1065.6 vs. Car = 6.564 s) (Figure 2)
Summary
This is evident from findings indicating that arbitrary odorants can elicit autonomic reactions or motor responses in infants ([1,2]; reviewed in [3,4]). It is evident from studies assessing the role of natural odorants or of extraneous odorants familiarized during nurturing interactions. The latter studies have found that olfaction promotes a range of early regulatory functions. When newborns are exposed to their mother’s breast odor, they display longer episodes of eye opening as compared to the same situation with no odor [8]
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