Ever wondered how babies perceive the world around them? A recent study published in the Child Development journal has shed light on this intriguing topic. According to the study conducted by researchers from Universite de Bourgogne and the University of Hamburg, infants between four and 12 months old use their mother's scent to help recognise faces.

The research highlighted that infants benefit significantly from their mother's smell, which aids in their ability to perceive faces. As infants grow older within this age range, their visual perception of faces improves, and they rely less on other sensory cues.

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The study aimed to determine how infants transition from relying on smell to recognizing faces visually as they develop. Researchers tested 50 infants aged 4 to 12 months and observed that their brain responses to faces became more specialised and sophisticated over time, indicating enhanced face perception as they matured.

“As expected, we also found that the benefit of adding the mother’s body odour diminishes with age, confirming an inverse relation between the effectiveness of visual perception and its sensitivity to a concurrent odour,” said Dr. Arnaud Leleu, Associate Professor of psychology and neuroscience from the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, France.

She emphasised the importance of early exposure to different sensory inputs for infants' perceptual learning. This early learning process not only helps infants in perceiving faces but also contributes to the development of higher cognitive abilities such as memory, language skills, and conceptual reasoning.

Agencies