Media release

From: Frontiers

Exploring the sense of smell in infants

Imaging study reveals that infants as young as 1-month old process odors, shedding light on how early neural processes for the sense of smell develop in humans.

The sense of smell promotes adaptive behaviors such as feeding and soothing, but how early humans begin to process odors represents a gap in knowledge for researchers. In a new study in JNeurosci, Thorsten Kahnt from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and colleagues explored olfaction development in humans and reveal how early humans begin to smell. The researchers used fMRI to image the brains of sleeping infants as they inhaled appetitive (pleasant) and aversive (unpleasant) odors. As early as one month of age, odors triggered activity in brain regions strongly associated with the sense of smell, as well as the thalamus, which is important for processing sensory information in general. The strength of activation varied across odors, but unlike what is observed in adults, distinct odors did not trigger unique activation patterns. Additionally, nasal airflow findings from this study suggest that sleeping infants inhale more vigorously when scents are appetitive than aversive.