Le visage : l'objet visuel préféré du bébé

National audience

A neural marker of rapid discrimination of facial expression in 3.5 and 7-month-old infants

Little is known about infants' ability to rapidly discriminate a facial expression against many others. Here, we investigated the development of facial expression discrimination in infancy with fast periodic visual stimulation coupled with scalp electroencephalography (EEG). EEG was recorded in 3.5- and 7-month-old infants (n=18 per group) displayed with an expressive (disgust or happy) or neutral female face at a base stimulation frequency of 6 Hz. Pictures of the same individual randomly expressing other expressions (either anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, or neutrality) were introduced every 6 stimuli (i.e., at 6/6 = 1 Hz) to directly isolate a discrimination response between th…

Body odor and perfume of caregivers are salient to typically- and atypically- developing young children

Body odor and perfume of caregivers are salient to typically- and atypically- developing young children. 24. Annual Meeting of the European-Chemoreception-Research-Organization (ECRO)

Responsiveness of human neonates to the odor of 5alpha-androst-16-en-3-one: A behavioral paradox?

The odorous steroid 5alpha-androst-16-en-3-one (AND) occurs in numerous biological fluids in mammals, including man, where it is believed to play a chemocommunicative role. As AND was recently detected in milk and amniotic fluid, sensitivity and hedonic responses to this substance were assessed in human neonates. To this aim, respiration and facial expressions were recorded in 3-day-old newborns in response to aqueous solutions of AND, ranging from 500ng/mL to 0.5 fg/mL. Although analyses of respiratory rate did not lead to clear-cut results, the newborns changed their facial expressions at concentrations not detected by adults in a triangle test. Newborns displayed negative facial actions …

Odorization of a novel object can influence infant's exploratory behavior in unexpected ways.

International audience; Although much is known about the development of object exploration during infancy, it remains to be understood whether and how olfaction can influence infants' interactions with novel objects. To address these issues, sixteen infants aged 7-15 months were videotaped during two consecutive 5-min free play sessions with a scented or an unscented version of visually similar objects. Results indicate that adding an odor to a novel object influenced the infants' behavior: the infants exhibited more and longer manipulations and mouthing of the unscented object than of the scented object. The differential responsiveness to the scented, relative to the unscented, object was …

Adaptive value of maternal odors in human neonates

Affective matching of odors and facial expressions in infants: shifting patterns between 3 and 7 months.

Recognition of emotional facial expressions is a crucial skill for adaptive behavior. Past research suggests that at 5 to 7 months of age, infants look longer to an unfamiliar dynamic angry/happy face which emotionally matches a vocal expression. This suggests that they can match stimulations of distinct modalities on their emotional content. In the present study, olfaction-vision matching abilities were assessed across different age groups (3, 5 and 7 months) using dynamic expressive faces (happy vs. disgusted) and distinct hedonic odor contexts (pleasant, unpleasant and control) in a visual-preference paradigm. At all ages the infants were biased toward the disgust faces. This visual bias…

Matching emotional expressions of faces within an olfactory context: Does my own feeling matter?

Maternal odor selectively enhances rapid face categorization from natural images in the 4-month-old infant brain

Maternal odor selectively enhances the categorization of face(like) stimuli in the 4 month-old infant brain

Présentation Poster; International audience; In the 4-month-old infant brain, the visual categorization of natural face images is enhanced by concomitant maternal odor (Leleu et al., 2019), providing support for the early perception of congruent associations between co-occurring inputs from multiple senses. Here, we further explore whether this maternal odor effect is selective to faces or if it can be explained by a more general influence of salient odor cues on the perception of any visual object category. In Experiment 1, scalp electroencephalogram was recorded during a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS-EEG) while 4-month-old infants were exposed to the maternal vs. a control odor. …

Maternal odor favors the categorization of faces in younger, but not older, infants

L'olfaction dans les transitions du développement précoce : données empiriques et implications cliniques

À la recherche de l’intelligence : de la mesure et de l’organisation

Cet ouvrage aborde le champ des difficultés et des troubles de la vie intellectuelle et cognitive dans l’enfance et, plus généralement, celui des apprentissages et des moyens psychiques d’accès à la connaissance impliqués dans la réussite scolaire en particulier, et dans la réussite plus globale de l’enfant dans sa vie d’enfant, son bien-être, son développement harmonieux et dans sa future vie d’adulte.Fondé sur l’expérience clinique des auteurs auprès des enfants et des adolescents, mais aussi sur un enseignement dans le cadre d’un Diplôme universitaire, ce livre apporte également un éclairage plus large sur les processus impliqués dans les activités d’apprendre, de connaître et de penser,…

Sight sublimated by odors: effect of subliminal odors on facial emotion detection.

Chemocommunication in a vision-ruled world

Seeing odors in color: Cross-modal associations in children and adults from two cultural environments

International audience; We investigated the occurrence and underlying processes of odor–color associations in French and American 6- to 10-year-old children (n = 386) and adults (n = 137). Nine odorants were chosen according to their familiarity to either cultural group. Participants matched each odor with a color, gave hedonic and familiarity judgments, and identified each odor. By 6 years of age, children displayed culture-specific odor–color associations, but age differences were noted in the type of associations. Children and adults in both cultural groups shared common associations and formed associations that were unique to their environment, underscoring the importance of exposure le…

Crossmodal associations between vision and olfaction: evidence from eye movements

I've got your nose, I know how you feel: odor effects on the visual processing of faces in 7 month-old infants

I've got your nose, I know how you feel: odor effects on the visual processing of faces in 7 month-old infants. 24. Annual Meeting of the European-Chemoreception-Research-Organization (ECRO)

Développement social et alimentaire du jeune mammifère

Olfactorily-conspicuous nipples as vital interfaces for colostrum intake in humans

Caractérisation de quelques substrats mammaires odorants impliqués dans le succès de la tétée des souriceaux

Visual scanning behaviors of 8-month-old infants facing expressive faces

Visual scanning behaviors of 8-month-old infants facing expressive faces. 12. european congress of psychology

Smell what you hardly see: When odors assist the visual brain

Newborn crawling and rooting in response to maternal breast odor

International audience; A growing literature shows that perception and action are already tightly coupled in the newborn. The current study aimed to examine the nature of the coupling between olfactory stimuli from the mother and the newborn's crawling and rooting (exploratory movements of the head). To examine the coupling, the crawling and rooting behavior of 28 2-day-old newborns were studied while they were supported prone on a mobility device shaped like a mini skateboard, the Crawliskate®, their head positioned directly on top of a pad infused with either their mother's breast odor (Maternal) or the odor of water (Control). Video and 3D kinematic analyses of the number and types of li…

Qualitative differences in the exploration of upright and upside-down faces in four-month-old infants : An eye-movement study

The goal of this study was to test if apprentice readers (6-7 to 7-8 years old) and beginner readers (8-9 to 10-11 years old) perceive syllabic units in written words. The paradigm of illusory conjunctions was used because it can determine the infra-lexical units identified at the first steps of the written stimuli process. Two experiments were conducted on children from the first (6-7 years old) to the last years (10-11 years old) of the learning-to-read process. Results have shown that children perceive syllables in letter sequences as soon as the end of the first year of the learning-to-read process. The perception of these units is the result of two information sources: the syllabic pho…

Maternal odor favors the categorization of faces in younger, but not older, infants

Born to smell and to smook

Three-month-old infants’ sensitivity to horizontal information within faces

Horizontal information is crucial to face processing in adults. Yet the ontogeny of this preferential type of processing remains unknown. To clarify this issue, we tested 3-month-old infants' sensitivity to horizontal information within faces. Specifically, infants were exposed to the simultaneous presentation of a face and a car presented in upright or inverted orientation while their looking behavior was recorded. Face and car images were either broadband (UNF) or filtered to only reveal horizontal (H), vertical (V) or this combined information (HV). As expected, infants looked longer at upright faces than at upright cars, but critically, only when horizontal information was preserved in …

Odors mediate the visual categorization of ambiguous stimuli in the human brain

Selective attention to facial identity and emotion in children

Three age groups of participants (6–8 years, 9–11 years, adults) performed two tasks: A face recognition task and a Garner task. In the face recognition task, the participants were presented with 20 faces and then had to recognize them among 20 new faces. In the Garner tasks, the participants had to sort, as fast as possible, the photographs of two persons expressing two emotions by taking into account only one of the two dimensions (identity or emotion). When the sorting task was on one dimension, the other dimension was varied either in a correlated, a constant or an orthogonal way in distinct subsessions. The results indicated an increase in face recognition abilities. They also showed a…

A propos d'un "mécanisme caché" de stimulation de la sensorimotricité (pressenti par André Bullinger)

Le colostrum, «fluide d’Ariane» entre mère intérieure et voie lactée

The Human Mammary Odour Factor: Variability and Regularities in Sources and Functions

In the course of evolution, human mothers have been, and still are, under strong selective pressure to induce their newborns’ colostrum ingestion promptly after birth. As a concentrate of nutrients, passive immunity, antioxidants, growth factors and symbiotic microbiota, colostrum functions as the evolved antidote to ubiquitous pathogens and threats of neonatal exhaustion. Under such constraints, any means to speed up colostrum/milk intake can only have been beneficial to neonatal viability and adaptive life onset along evolutionary time. The areolar-nipple areas of human lactating females emit lacteal substrates conveying chemostimuli that are attractive and release mouthing and sucking in…

Smell what you hardly see: when odors assist the visual cortex

How odors assist the developing visual system in humans

Précoces odeurs : perception, effets psychobiologiques, applications au bien-être de l'enfant

International audience

The time course of facial expression processing modulation by the olfactory context: an ERP study

What we smell orients what we look at

Human neonates prefer colostrum to mature milk: Evidence for an olfactory bias toward the "initial milk"?

International audience; OBJECTIVES: Colostrum is the initial milk secretion which ingestion by neonates warrants their adaptive start in life. Colostrum is accordingly expected to be attractive to newborns. The present study aims to assess whether colostrum is olfactorily attractive for 2-day-old newborns when presented against mature milk or a control. METHODS: The head-orientation of waking newborns was videotaped in three experiments pairing the odors of: (a) colostrum (sampled on postpartum day 2, not from own mother) and mature milk (sampled on average on postpartum day 32, not from own mother) (n tested newborns = 15); (b) Colostrum and control (water; n = 9); and (c) Mature milk and …

Olfaction scaffolds the developing human from neonate to adolescent and beyond

The impact of the olfactory sense is regularly apparent across development. The fetus is bathed in amniotic fluid (AF) that conveys the mother's chemical ecology. Transnatal olfactory continuity between the odours of AF and milk assists in the transition to nursing. At the same time, odours emanating from the mammary areas provoke appetitive responses in newborns. Odours experienced from the mother's diet during breastfeeding, and from practices such as pre-mastication, may assist in the dietary transition at weaning. In parallel, infants are attracted to and recognize their mother's odours; later, children are able to recognize other kin and peers based on their odours. Familiar odours, su…

Odor-driven visual categorization in the infant brain

The Development of Perceptual Sensitivity to Second-Order Facial Relations in Children

This study investigated children's perceptual ability to process second-order facial relations. In total, 78 children in three age groups (7, 9, and 11 years) and 28 adults were asked to say whether the eyes were the same distance apart in two side-by-side faces. The two faces were similar on all points except the space between the eyes, which was either the same or different, with various degrees of difference. The results showed that the smallest eye spacing children were able to discriminate decreased with age. This ability was sensitive to face orientation (upright or upside-down), and this inversion effect increased with age. It is concluded here that, despite early sensitivity to conf…

Mimicking emotions: how 3–12-month-old infants use the facial expressions and eyes of a model

International audience; While there is an extensive literature on the tendency to mimic emotional expressions in adults, it is unclear how this skill emerges and develops over time. Specifically, it is unclear whether infants mimic discrete emotion-related facial actions, whether their facial displays are moderated by contextual cues and whether infants’ emotional mimicry is constrained by developmental changes in the ability to discriminate emotions. We therefore investigate these questions using Baby-FACS to code infants’ facial displays and eye-movement tracking to examine infants’ looking times at facial expressions. Three-, 7-, and 12-month-old participants were exposed to dynamic faci…

Olfaction and gustation

International audience

The milk “bouquet”, its effects on newborns, its composition

A developmental trade-off: Maternal odor tutors face categorization in younger, but not older, infants

Learning to see faces with body odors

Visual exploration and discrimination of emotional facial expressions in 3-, 7- and 12-month-old infants

The first year of life is critical in the development of the abilities to process facial expressions. Numerous studies have investigated discrimination and categorization of distinct facial expressions of emotion. However, infants' visual exploratory strategies of these facial expressions and their developmental paths remain unclear. The perfection of eye movement tracking systems makes now the detailed analysis of facial exploration of faces feasible, and hence facilitates the identification of the features in facial expressions which infants focus on. In this study, oculometric parameters of 3- (n=36), 7- (n=66) and 12-month-old infants (n=59) were collected while facial expressions were …

Exploration oculaire du visage et expression faciale chez le jeune enfant : une approche qualitative du développement cognitif et social

National audience

Maternal odor selectively enhances the categorization of face(like) stimuli in the 4-month-old infant brain

In the 4-month-old infant brain, the visual categorization of natural face images is enhanced by concomitant maternal odor (Leleu et al., 2019), providing support for the early perception of congruent associations between co-occurring inputs from multiple senses. Here, we further explore whether this maternal odor effect is selective to faces or if it can be explained by a more general influence of salient odor cues on the perception of any visual object category. In Experiment 1, scalp electroencephalogram was recorded during a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS-EEG) while 4-month-old infants were exposed to the maternal vs. a control odor. In rapid 6-Hz streams of natural images (i.e.…

The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information

International audience; The development of children's ability to recognize facial emotions and the role of configural information in this development were investigated. In the study, 100 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and 26 adults needed to recognize the emotion displayed by upright and upside-down faces. The same participants needed to recognize the emotion displayed by the top half of an upright or upside-down face that was or was not aligned with a bottom half that displayed another emotion. The results showed that the ability to recognize facial emotion develops with age, with a developmental course that depends on the emotion to be recognized. Moreover, children at all ages and adults e…